Peripatetica treated this shameful outburst with all the stern contempt it so truly merited, as she was engaged in making the acquaintance of a descendant of that great race of Northmen who had made history all over Sicily and the rest of Europe. He too was a conqueror, though his weapon was a paint-brush and a modelling tool instead of a sword, and kings received him with all the honours due an acknowledged ruler of a realm. He dwelt by a great lake far to the north in that “nursery of kings” in a home built five hundred years ago of huge fir-trees; logs so sound and clean-fibred that the centuries had left the wood still as firm as stone. Making his play of resurrection of the old wild melodies of the North, of the old costumes and industries of the people from whose loins had sprung half the rulers of the continent. The Sea Rover’s blood was strong in him too, driving him to wander in a boat no bigger than those of his Viking ancestors along the stormy fjords and fierce coasts to the still more distant north. For the adornment of the log-built home Sicily had yielded to his wise searching various relics of antiquity, Greek, Norman, Saracen, and Spanish, and in the ensuing days in which Jane and Peripatetica were permitted to tread the same path with the Northman and his beautiful wife, these treasures came out of pockets to be fitted with dates and history, and even, in the delightful instance of one small ghostly grotesque, to change owners. While the two seekers of Persephone were gathering 231and savouring this refreshing tang of the cold salt of the northern seas, this large vista of the gay, poised strength of a mighty race—their train was looping and coiling through summer hills to the seat of summer—cherry and apple, peach and pear trees tossed wreaths of rose and white from amid the grey of olives and the green of citron, for this was the land of Mignon’s homesick dream—“das Land, wo die Citronen blüh’n.” Miles and miles and miles of orange and lemon groves ran beside their path; climbing the hills and creeping down to the edge of the tideless sea. Trees that were nurtured like babies; each orchard gathered about old grey or rose-washed tanks holding the precious water which is the life-blood of all this golden culture during the rainless summer. Tanks moist and dripping and fringed with ferns, mirroring the overhanging yellow fruit, or the pink geraniums that peeped over the shoulders of the broad-bladed cacti to blush happily at their own reflections in the water.