So Daphnis spake, and ended; but fain would Aphrodite have given him back to life. Nay, spun was all the thread that the Fates assigned, and Daphnis went 137down the stream. The whirling wave closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the nymphs. Give o’er, ye Muses, come, give o’er the pastoral song! And thou, give me the bowl, and the she-goat, that I may milk her and pour forth a libation to the Muses. Farewell, oh, farewells manifold, ye Muses, and I, some future day, will sing you yet a sweeter song. The Goatherd. Filled may thy fair mouth be with honey, Thyrsis, and filled with the honeycomb; and the sweet dried fig mayest thou eat of Ægilus, for thou vanquishest the cicala in song! Lo, here is thy cup, see, my friend, of how pleasant a savour! Thou wilt think it has been dipped in the well-spring of the Hours. Hither, hither, Cissætha: do thou milk her, Thyrsis. And you young she-goats, wanton not so wildly lest you bring up the he-goat against you. “What a crowded place Sicily is!” cried Jane, heaving an oppressed breath. “Isn’t it?” sympathized Peripatetica. “Here we are on our way to the very fountain, as it seems, of history—Syracuse, where nearly everything happened that ever did happen, and yet one has to mentally push one’s way through a swarming crowd of events to get there, because almost everything that didn’t happen in Syracuse occurred in these Sicilian plains. When you think of the layer on layer of human life, like geologic strata, that lies all over this place, you realize that it would take half a lifetime to come to some understanding of the significance of it all, and that it’s 138foolish to go on until one can get some hold upon the meaning of what lies right here.” This “simple but first-class conversation” took place in the eating-station at Catania which the two had all to themselves, most of the Tedeschi tourists frugally remaining in the train and staying their pangs from bottles, and with odds and ends out of paper parcels, from which feasts they emerged later replete but crumby. Poor Catania! sunk to a mere feeding-trough for passing tourists. She, the great city sitting blandly among her temples and towers, wooed for her money bags by all the warlike neighbours. For whenever her neighbours squabbled with one another, which was pretty nearly all the time—or whenever an outsider intervened—each strove to engage the aid of this rich landholder, sending embassies and emissaries to bully or cajole Catania. As rich folk will, she always tried to protect herself by taking neither side completely, speaking fair to each, and, like all Laodiceans, she made thereby two enemies instead of one, and was considered fair prey by both.