Broken and wild as is the land it is still cultivated; the olive still climbs up to where the clouds come down, but where are the magnificent forests, the wonder and joy of antiquity? Where the brooks and streams and lakes, whose dropping waters sang all through the records of the elder world? Where are those fields so blessed by Demeter that they offered to the hands of men illimitable floods of golden grain? Where are the vines that wreathed the mountains’ brows with green and purple grapes, as if it had been the brow of Dionysius the wine god? Where, too, are the meadows so thick with flowers that for the richness of the perfume the hounds could not hold the scent of the game? Meadows where the bees wantoned in such honeyed delight that the air vibrated with their murmuring as with the vibrating of multitudinous harp strings?... Listen to the story, which, when it was told was only a prophecy and a warning, but a warning never heeded. Erysicthon cuts down the grove sacred to Demeter. A grove so thick “that an arrow could hardly pass through; its pines and fruit trees and tall poplars within, and the water like pale gold running through the conduits.” One of the poplars receives the first stroke, and Demeter, hearing the ringing of the axe, appears, stern and awful, hooded and veiled, and carrying poppies in her hand. To the ravager of her groves she threatens a divine curse of an everlasting thirst, of an insatiable, unsatisfied hunger, and the workmen, awed, depart, leaving the axes sticking in the trees, but Erysicthon drives them to their task 186again with blows, and soon the grove is levelled, and the heat of the day enters where once all was sweet shade. Erysicthon laughs at the futile curse of the goddess; he has had his will and nothing has happened. The water still runs and he can slake his drought, but the water escapes as he stoops for it, sinking into the earth before his eyes, leaving upon his lips only choking dust. No one can safely ignore the warnings of the gods, and he wanders, whipped by intolerable longings, and dies dreadfully, raving of his own folly. Neither Greeks, Romans, Saracens, nor Norman heed this parable, told ages and ages before the meaning of the loss of forests was understood. All over the land the clothing of oaks, chestnuts, and pines was stripped from the hills, and slowly but surely the curse of Demeter has turned it into a place of thirst. To-day less than five per cent of the whole island contains timber, and these high lands, these “fields which in the days of the Greeks returned one hundred times the amount of seed sowed, now yield but seven-fold, and only one-ninth of all the land is productive.” This is the story of the ravaging of Enna, once the true garden of Paradise, and now a rocky waste burned to the bone. “Ætna, The Salient Fact of Sicily”