some fine remains of a wall, which might have been called Cyclopian, but that the blocks which composed it were of _one_ size. Our guide, a mason, and, of course, an amateur of walls, insists upon our calling this a _capo d'opera_, as, no doubt, it is. On the spot itself there is nothing antique to see; but the drive or ride is one of the most remarkable in all the world! It takes you over from four to five miles of a rocky table-land, by a very gradual ascent, abounding with indelible traces of human frequentation, else long forgotten. The deep channelling of those wheels is still extant that had transported million tons of stone out of those interminable lines of quarries, to raise buildings of such grandeur as to give occasion to Cicero to say, that he had "seen nothing so imposing as the ancient port and walls of Syracuse!" The scene is altogether wild and peculiar; you pass for miles amidst excavated rock, and on the flagstones of ancient pavement, between the _commissures_ of which wild-flowers, principally of the _thistle_ kind, spring up into vigorous life, and look as if they grew out of the very stone itself. The small conduit-pipe of an underground aqueduct still serves to carry from the same sources the same water; but the people who used it are gone. In the wildest parts of the way, the large flat stones, that formed a continuous road, serve for _barn-floors_--or rather _threshing_-floors that require _no barns_--on which long-horned cattle tread out, without any chance of bad weather to injure, the golden grain of the Sicilian harvest. Here lives the blue-breasted _hermit bird_ in unmolested solitude; and, careless of solitude, the _Passer solitarius_ utters her small twitter in the hollows--a few goats browse amongst the scanty thistles, and one or two dogs protect them. Snakes, hatched in vast number under the warm stones, show you their progress, by the motion they impart to the thin light grass; and an endless variety of new lizards present themselves in a soil not untenanted, though barren. From a plain, justly called Bel Veduta, we see _Catania_ and _Lentini_, (Leontium,) famous once for its coinage, infamous now for its malaria. A little bay bears the great name of _Thapsus_; and, opposite, a small mass of nearly undistinguishable houses, the ambitious distinction of _Port Augusta_.