“Here am I, that unhappy city—no more a city—lying in ruins, my citizens dead men, alas! most ill-fated of all! The Fire-god destroyed me after the 50shock of the Earth-Shaker. Ah me! From so much loveliness I am become ashes. Yet do ye who pass me by bewail my fate, and shed a tear in my honour who am no more. A tomb of tombless men is the city, under whose ashes we lie.” Taormina, the little mountain town, crouched under Ætna’s southern side, not far from those meadows of Enna from which Persephone had been ravished away. There she would surely first return to the upper world, and Demeter’s joy burst into flowers and sunshine. So there they decided to seek her, and turned their grimy faces straight to the train. The only sight-seeing that appealed to them now was a vision of the San Domenico Hotel with quiet white monkish cells like to Amalfi’s to rest their weariness in, peaceful pergolas, large bathtubs, and a hearty table d’hôte luncheon. So they stayed not for sights, and stopped not for stone—nor breakfast, nor washing, nor even for their trunks, which had not materialized, but sat in a dusty railway carriage impatient for the train to start. “It was beautiful,” remarked Jane, thinking of the harbour approach to the city. “Yes,” said Peripatetica, jumping at her unexpressed meaning as usual. “Messina has always been a famous beauty, and always will be. But she is, and always has been, an incorrigible cocotte,—submitting without a struggle to every invader of Sicily in turn. And she certainly doesn’t in the least look her enormous age in spite of having led a vie orageuse. Whenever the traces of her past become too obvious she goes and takes an earthquake shock, they say, and rises fresh and rejuvenated from the ruins, ready to coquette 51again with a new master and be enticing and treacherous all over again.”[1] 1. Messina suffered a terrific earthquake shock in 1783 and has had in her history serious damage from seismic convulsions no less than nine times. It was hard to imagine on her modern boulevards the armies of the past—all those many conquerors that Messina had herself called in, causing half the wars and troubles of Sicily by her invitations to new powers to come and take possession, and to do the fighting for her that she never would do for herself; betraying in turn every master, good or bad, for the excitement of getting a new one.... Greeks, Carthagenians, Mamertines, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards—where were the ways of their tramplings now? On that modern light-house point there was not even a trace of the Golden Temple in which Neptune sat on a crystal altar “begirt with smooth-necked shells, sea-weeds, and coral, looking out eastward to the morning sun?”