placed here no doubt because this high spur was the only point in Girgenti from which one could catch a glimpse of the lofty steeps of Enna-Castrogiovanni. Turning at a sharp angle again they went slanting up across the bare hillside, the wild thyme sending up a keen sweet incense beneath their climbing feet, until they came to the verge of the great yellow broken cliff that shot up more than a thousand feet from the valley below. Some crumpling of the earth’s crust, ages ago, had forced up this sheer mass of sandstone, hung now with cactus, thyme, and vines, which served as one of the natural defences of Akragas, behind whose unscalable heights the unwarlike city had been enabled peacefully to pursue its gathering of wealth and luxury. Fortunato, leaning over the marge, clapped his hands suddenly, and a cloud of rock pigeons flew forth from the crevices, to wheel and flutter and settle again among the vines. Probably descendants of those pigeons who lived in these same crevices in the days of the monster Phalaris, and helped to compass his death. Pythagoras—that strange wanderer and mystic, whose outlines loom so beautiful and so incomprehensible through the vagueness of legend, was first flattered and then threatened by the Tyrant, who feared 226the philosopher’s teachings of freedom and justice. At one of those public discussions, so impossible in any other country ruled despotically, and yet so characteristically Greek—Pythagoras rounded a burst of eloquence by pointing to a flock of these pigeons fleeing before a hawk. “See what a vile fear is capable of,” he cried. “If but one of these pigeons dared to resist he would save his companions, who would have time to flee.” Fired by the suggestion the old Telemachus threw a stone at the Tyrant and despite the efforts of his guards, Phalaris was ground to a bloody paste by the stones and fury of the suddenly enfranchised Akragantines. “It is our last day,” Jane had said; “we will go and bid the temples good-bye.” Which was why she and Peripatetica were scaling in the sunset the golden cliffs which Concordia crowned, having come to it by a détour to Theron’s tomb.