There was more than mere fun in Thackeray’s tale of “The Rose and the Ring.” When the Fairy Blackstick frowned at Prince Giglio and said, “What you need, young man, is a little misfortune!” she asserted a most obvious and irritating fact. But it has one delightful side to it—that bitter draught that wise Doctor Fate insists on our taking from time to time; the good things, even tiny little ones that we never noticed before, do taste so wonderfully sweet afterwards! We were talking of shore forests—there is one, not of pine, but beeches, on the Adriatic, exactly opposite Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea.[13] Here a great promontory runs out towards the east, rising into mountains which have caused the whole to be called the “Monte Gargano,” though each peak has its own name besides. People call the isolated district (which really belongs to the Province of Molise) Manfredonia, from the name of its chief town, long a pet stronghold of Suabian King Manfred, who founded and fortified it in the thirteenth century. But Nature protected the Monte Gargano in another way and a very effectual one. It was meant to be an island; on the western side the Abruzzi shrinking back in the real mainland, and the Adriatic, withdrawing slowly from the coast, have left a strip of land many miles wide, flat, marshy, abominably feverish, as a kind of defensive trench to cut off the Gargano promontory from the rest of Italy, and, as it were, remind it for ever that by formation it does not belong to her at all, but to the limestone plateau of Dalmatia, across the way. This vast plain (for it stretches far and far past the promontory, towards the south) refuses to nourish a single tree on the few feet of soil which cover the mother-rock, but it provides such splendid food for sheep that since time immemorial it has been given up to them. Alphonsus I annexed it as a royal meadow in 1445, and imported his Spanish merinos with such success that two hundred years later four and a half million of the beautiful creatures were herded by Neapolitan peasants on these pastures. Even now, though only a scanty half-million graze on them, the sheep are lords and owners of all that ground.