... “No; the American man in no respect resembles the Sicilian donkey ... no; he does not ordinarily spend his life toiling humbly under the intolerable loads laid upon him by his imperious mate.... No; he is not a dull unintelligent drudge wholly unworthy of the radiant beings who permit him to surround them with an incredible luxury.... No; the 184American woman is not his intellectual superior. In everything of real practical importance he is immensely the superior.... No; he isn’t this.... No; he isn’t that.... He isn’t any one of the things the European thinks he is and—good bye!” The mountains all this while have been peaking up; mounting, climbing, rolling more wildly, and at last two of them soar splendidly, sweep up close on to three thousand feet into the sky ... Castrogiovanni and Calascibetta, and the train drops Jane and Peripatetica at their feet. Memory has cast out, or has pushed into the background, the long weary jolting up to the wild little wind-swept town; makes no record of the hotel or the fellow tourists; has jotted down a certain straight wild beauty in the inhabitants, who have eagle-like Saracen profiles, but grey Norman eyes. Has left well in the foreground a dark castle, and a cluster of half-ruined towers. All else of modern details she has rejected, except a great wash of blue, a vast vista of tumbling broken landscape, huge and stern, for she has been busy with a picture of the past; building up an imagination of vanished gods moving about their mighty affairs, playing out Olympian dramas in this lofty land. Here is the very centre of the God’s-land, the “umbilicus Siciliæ,” the Key of Sicily, Enna “the inexpugnable,” the strongest natural fortress in the world, which no one ever took except by treachery; which the Saracens besieged in vain for thirty-one years, and when they finally got it, through a treason, the Normans in their turn could not dislodge them until all Sicily had been theirs for a quarter of a century, and then only through another betrayal. In the great 185slave war Eunus, the serf, held it against the whole power of Rome for two years until he too was betrayed.