Jane, who consults her Theocritus oftener in Sicily than her Baedeker—for she says she finds that Theocritus has on the whole a better literary style—is the one who suggests this idyllic alternative. “Just listen to him!” she cries. “This would be travel really worth while recording. He is telling of just such a journey, and of the pause at one of the hill farms: “‘So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus, turned aside into the house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with delight in beds of sweet tamarisk and fresh cuttings from the vines, strewed on the ground. Many poplars and elm trees were waving over our heads, and not far off the running of the sacred water from the cave of the nymphs warbled to us; in the shimmering grass the sunburnt grasshoppers were busy with their talk, and from afar the owl cried softly out of the tangled thorns of the blackberry. The larks were singing 181and the hedge birds, and the turtle dove moaned; the bees flew round and round the fountains, murmuring softly. The scent of late summer and the fall of the year was everywhere; the pears fell from the trees at our feet, and apples in number rolled down at our sides, and the young plum trees bent to the earth with the weight of their fruit. “‘The wax, four years old, was loosed from the heads of the wine jars. O! nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the stony cave of Phulus? Was it nectar like this that made that mighty shepherd on Anapus’ shore, Polyphemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses’ ships, dance among his sheep-folds? A cup like this ye poured out now upon the altar of Demeter, who presides over the threshing floor. May it be mine once more to dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of corn; and may I see her smile upon me, holding poppies and handfuls of corn in her two hands!’” Instead of being accompanied on their arcadian journey by Eucritus and the fair Amyntichus, they have as companions in the little carriage of the Regie Ferrovia the two dark foreigners from Syracuse, upon whose nationality they have speculated at idle moments. They prove to be Poles. Two gentlemen from Cracow, escaped for a moment from its snows to make a little “giro” in the Sicilian sunshine. Conversation develops around Ætna—of all places! Peripatetica catches sight of it, as the train rounds a curve, sees it suddenly looming against the sky, a glittering 182cone of silver swimming upon a base of misty hyacinth-blue. By a gesture she calls everyone’s attention to this new and charming pose of that ever spectacular mountain.