The Villa Giulia, as they might have foreseen, was just the sort of thing Goethe would have liked—and they had been violently disagreeing with Goethe all over Sicily. An untouched example of the most tiresome form of Eighteenth Century gardening—a cross between a wedding cake and a German Noah’s Ark. All rigid, glaring, gravelly little allées, with trees as denuded of natural luxuriance as a picked chicken; sugar-icing grottoes; baroque fountains; gaudy music kiosks; cages of frowzy birds and mangy monkeys; and posé busts in self-conscious bowers. Not here could these Eden-exiled Eves lunch, nor yet in the untidy, uninteresting Botanic Gardens next door—a wilderness of potted specimens and obtrusive labels—but wandering melancholily around a vast egregious gas tank, they came upon a long, neglected avenue of great trees; all that was left of some once lovely villa swept out of existence by the gas works. And here upon a stone bench in the glimmering shade they fed at the feet of a feeble little knock-kneed marble King. One of the Spanish monarchs of Sicily it was, thus commemorated in marble Roman armour and a curled marble wig, and his rickety, anæmic majesty moved them to smiling pity, so feeble and miserable he looked, forgotten and overshadowed by modern gas tanks, his boneless legs ready to give under him, and his peevish face smeared with creeping lichens. The green tunnel of the trees framed a blazing sapphire at the other end—a glimpse of the bay—and ragged pink roses, and neglected purple iris bloomed together along the path. Ere another year the blight of the gas works will have 237swept away the airy avenue, the wilding flowers, the poor spineless little King, and the two bid it all a wistfully smiling farewell, knowing they should never again eat an April day’s bread and cheese under those sweet auspices.