He refused to have his eyes bound, and looked calmly on while the muskets of the firing party were being loaded. When all was ready, he straightened himself up and looked steadily at his executioners. “Spare my face,” he said, “and aim at my heart.” So died Joachim Murat, in the forty-eighth year of his life, and he met his end with a fearlessness and dignity which shone the brighter for the squalid surroundings in which he displayed them. There is a story still current in the Penisola, that after his death his head was cut off, by Ferdinand’s order, and carried to Naples, in order that the “Butcher King” might be sure that his gallant enemy was no more. One would have imagined that the gruesome proof would have satisfied him, and having seen it he would have been content to bury it decently. But the report goes on to say that nothing would induce him to part with it afterwards, and that he kept it in a specially constructed case, under lock and key, by the side of his bed. Here, whenever his crazy panics seized him, he could open the box and finger the head and reassure himself again. And all this happened, not in the time of Caligula or Tiberius, but three years before the birth of Queen Victoria. CHAPTER XVII ITALIAN SEAS Let us return to happier themes! Many and enchanting books have been written about Italian cities and Italian country, but none about our Italian seas. People who look at the map may think this a limited subject; there is the Mediterranean, and there is the Adriatic—what more can be said? _Amici miei_, to a sea-lover there are as many seas as ports; the dear salt water and the sunrise and the sunset know it, and have a separate caress for each. They make—or fit into—the thousand moods of mind that colour a pilgrim’s life, and the pictures of them in my gallery of remembrance are clearer than any of my landscapes and more helpful—because they never hurt. The landscapes, all except the loveliest ones where the spirit poised for one longing instant—like a bird on the topmast of a ship, and, like the bird, was given no more than time to take breath and wing away again—are mostly inhabited. Here your friend quarrelled with you; there your true love kissed you and betrayed; farther on your child was sick and every aspect of the most beautiful scenery in the world brings back only the poignant watches when a flush of colour in the little face sent you crazy with joy, and something wrong again with the little pulse froze your heart with fear. On land we cannot get away from ourselves and others; earth is greedily dominant, monstrously exacting. But the sea repudiates all individual ties. You must be empty of yourself, or it will not speak to you at all. Its laws are not our laws, and the first thing it does, if you are docile to its magic, is to wash out your personality, and oh, how glad some of us are—or would be—if we only could utterly forget that irritant, insistent factor of existence!