Which was why, while Jane settled down comfortably to a copy of Theocritus, Peripatetica continued to entertain her own soul with spoken and unspoken comments as to a certain restful letting down of tension which resulted from sliding away from the dazzling, lofty Olympianism of Taormina into a region Cyclopean, perhaps, but with a dawning suggestion of coming humanity. For here, in this plain, succeeding those bright presences that were the elementary forces of nature—forces of the earth and sea and sun, of fire and dew, of thunder, wind, and rain, of the shining day, and the night with its changing moon—first came the primitive earth-spirits, rude and rugged, or delicate and vapourous. Creatures not gods—no longer immutable and immortal, but stronger, older, greater than man, who was yet to come. Creatures partaking somewhat of the nature of both gods and men, but subject to transformation into stream and fountain, into tree and flower; very near to the earth, 129yet swayed by human passions, by human sorrows and joys. This plain was the home of nymph and oread, of dryad and faun. Here had the Cyclops and the Titans wrought—first of the great race of Armourers and Smiths—under the tutelage of Vulcan, shaping the beams of the heavens, and the ribs of the earth; arming the gods and forging the lightning. Ulysses, the earliest of impassioned tourists, had had dealings on this very spot with the last of the Cyclops. A degenerate scion of the great old race, as the last of a great race is apt to be, Polyphemus had sunk to the mere keeping of sheep, and according to Ulysses’ own story he got the better of Polyphemus, and related, upon returning home, the triumph of his superior cunning, with the same naïve relish with which the modern Cookie retails his supposed outwitting of the native curio dealer. Very near to the train, as it ran by the sea’s edge, lay the huge fragments of lava which the blinded Cyclop had cast in futile rage after the escaping Greeks. He was a great stone-thrower, was Polyphemus, for further along the coast lay the boulders he had flung at Acis, the beautiful young shepherd. Polyphemus having still an eye in those days, his aim was truer, and the shepherd was killed, but who may baffle true love? The dead boy melted away beneath the stones and was transformed to the bright and racing river Acis (which they crossed just then), and the river, flowing round the stones, runs still across the plain to fling itself into the arms of the sea-nymph Galatea. So the two still meet as of old, and play laughingly together in and out among the huge rocks, which certainly might have been flung there by Ætna 130in one of her volcanic furies, but which, if one may believe the Greek story, were really the gigantic weapons of a cruel jealousy.