Is it possible that I, a child of the nineteenth century, grown old in the twentieth, ever paid a visit to Ulysses in the Island of Ithaca? Sometimes it seems to me that I did once long ago achieve this impossibility—or was it such a dream as fairies in their wanton play send forth from the ivory gate to mock the children of men? It happened in this wise. In the winter of 1872 the Duke of Sutherland, Billy Russell[33] and I were at Genoa on our way to Egypt. The Duke was a devoted friend and admirer of Garibaldi and longing to go and take the old hero by surprise in his island home. We heard that a small coasting steamer, a “tramp,” was about to sail for Caprera with provisions, mails and what-not; so we arranged to go with her, the skipper undertaking to stop for a while at Caprera and then take us on to Naples, where we could join our ship for Alexandria. Our tiny Genoese tramp was a wicked little craft, dirty and foul beyond belief, and with her wheezings and snortings, her groanings and creakings, her paddles and engines, quite out of the Homeric poem. We ought at least to have started on our Odyssey in a felucca with a lateen sail; but we needs must be content to tempt the rather treacherous sea prosaically, but in comparative certainty of reaching our destination. It was a lovely February morning which, after a night of poisonous smells, some oily, some pungent, all unutterable, revealed the strip of yellow beach which fringes the storm-beaten island rocks. It did not take long to get out a gig, and nothing loth to be quit of our rather pestilential surroundings, we hurried ashore. The Duke, eager to shake his friend by the hand, almost ran up the few hundred yards of rock and scrub which led to the house. Billy and I, who did not know the General, and who were more or less in the position of the two gentlemen at the feast of Nasidienus “quas Mæcenas adduxerat umbras,” were discreet and more leisurely.