prospect of the city which had been so highly recommended by the porter. It was the midday Sabbath hour, when the bells at last were silent; and since it was fine August weather, the sky had achieved a watery and pious blue like a nun's eyes. Before her and behind her the river of the wall flowed through a champaign of roofs from which towers and spires rose like trees; but more interesting to Jasmine's lonely mood were the small back gardens immediately below the parapet on either side, from which the faintly acrid perfume of late summer flowers came up mingled with beefy smells from the various windows of the small houses beyond, where the shadowy inmates were eating their Sunday dinners. She felt that if this were Italy a friendly hand would be beckoning to her from one of those windows an invitation to join the party, and it was with another grudge against England that she sat down alone on a municipal bench to eat from a triangular cardboard box six triangular ham sandwiches. The restless alchemy of nature had set to work to change the essences of the container and the contents, so that the sandwiches tasted more like cardboard and the cardboard felt more like sandwiches; no doubt it would even have tasted more like sandwiches if Jasmine had eaten the box, which she might easily have done, for her taste had been blunted by the long journey, and she would have chewed ambrosia as mechanically had ambrosia been offered to her. The sandwiches finished, she ate half a dozen plums, the stones of which dropped on the path and joined the stones of other plums eaten by other people on the same bench that morning. Jasmine's mind went swooping back over the journey, past the bright azure lakes of Savoy, past the stiff and splendid _carabinieri_ at the frontier, pausing for a moment to play hide-and-seek with olives and sea through the tunnels of the _riviera di levante_ ... and then swooped down, down more swiftly until it reached the island of Sirene, from which it had been torn not yet four full days ago; the while Jasmine's foot was arranging the plum stones and a few loose pebbles into first an S and then an I and then a decrepit R, until they exhausted themselves over an absurdly elongated E. The weathercock of the nearest church steeple found enough wind on this hot afternoon to indicate waveringly that what wind there was blew from the South. Some lines of Christina Rossetti often quoted by her father expressed, as only remembered poetry and remembered scents can, the inexpressible: _To see no more the country half my own,_ _Nor hear the half-familiar speech,_ _Amen, I say; I turn to that bleak North_ _Whence I came forth--_ _The South lies out of reach._ _But when our swallows fly back to the South,_ _To the sweet South, to the sweet South,_ _The tears may come again into my eyes,_ _On the old wise,_ _And the sweet name to my mouth._