Peripatetica, having but recently suffered the loss of a maiden slave of a dozen years’ standing, had suffered a like moral disintegration, and she violently lost her taste for travel whenever it became necessary to move from one place to another, attempting to deal with her packing by a mere series of helpless paw-wavings, most picturesque to observe, but which for all practical purposes were highly inefficient. So when she and Jane dropped down and down the zigzags to Giardini—each 127of those famous views self-consciously presenting itself in turn for the last time—the light figure which hurled itself boldly down the steeps by a short cut, springing along the daring descent with the sure-footed confidence of a goat, proved to be not a wing-heeled Mercury conveying an affectionate message from the gods, but merely a boy from the villa fetching Peripatetica’s left-behind nail brush, hot-water bottle, and umbrella.... From Giardini a spacious plain curves all the way to Syracuse. This broken level is built upon a foundation of inky lava cast out from Hephæstos’ forge in Ætna, in whose wrinkled crevices of black and broken stone has been caught and held all the stored richness of the denuded mountains so long ago stripped of trees; and in this plain grain and flowers and trees innumerable find food and footing. Peripatetica, bred in deep-soiled, fertile fields with wide horizons, drew, as they passed into the open vistas, deep breaths of refreshment and joy. The fierce, soaring aridity of Taormina had oppressed her with a restless sense of imprisonment. Her elbows were as passionate lovers of liberty as the Spartans, and she demanded proper space in which to move them. What she called a view was a view, not merely more mountains climbing, blind and obstinate, between the eye and the landscape. Being, too, of a race always worshippers of Demeter—a race which had spent generations in her service, which considered the cultivation of the soil the only possible occupation of a gentleman, and all other businesses the mere wretched astonishing fate of the unfortunate—she rejoiced loudly and fatiguingly over the blessedness of a return to a sweet land of farms. 128“I don’t call that Taormina window-box-gardening on tiny stone ledges a thousand feet up in the air farming,” she scoffed. “If your tongue was a spade what crops you would raise!” sniffed Jane. “Well, I raise big harvests of diversion in my own spirit,” retorted the unsuppressed chatterer. “Besides, it’s now my turn to talk. You have done a lot of elaborate speechifying about Taormina. I made you a present of the whole jaggèd, attitudinizing old place, and for the moment I mean to flow unchecked! You needn’t listen if you don’t like. I enjoy hearing myself speak, whether anyone pays the smallest attention or not.”