They have looked down into the clear depths of La Pisma’s spring. Jane says it is less beautiful than the Silver Spring in Florida out which the Ocklawaha river rises, but that fountain of a tropical forest—transparent as air, and held in a great argent bowl—has no history, while La Pisma was the playmate of fair Persephone, and on seeing her ravished away by fiery Pluto melted quite away into a flood of bright tears. And it was she who, having caught up Persephone’s dropped veil, floated it to the feet of Demeter, and told her where to look for the lost daughter. La Pisma and Anapus her lover were, too, the real guardians of Syracuse, for as one after another of the armies of invading enemies camped on their oozy plain they sapped the invaders’ strength, and blighted their courage with fevers from the miasmatic breaths exhaled upon the foes as they slept. Jane and Peripatetica have found another mystery. Syracuse, it appears, is full of mysteries. This last is known as the Castle of Euryalus, and they must take horse and drive to it, six miles from the hotel, though still within the walls of the original city, once twenty-two miles about; shrunk in these later days to less than three. This six miles of pilgrimage gives ample time to search the guide-books for information as to this thing they have come out for to see. But the guide-books palter, and shuffle and evade, as they are 161prone to do about anything really interesting. Euryalus, solid enough to their eyes and to their sense of touch, seems as illusive in history as the cloudy towers of the Fata Morgana—now you see it, and now you don’t. It seems to come from nowhere. No one can tell when or by whom it was built, but it always turns up in the history of Syracuse in moments of stress—much like those Christian patron-saints who used suddenly to descend in shining armour to turn the tide of battle. One hears of Dionysius strengthening it when news comes that the dread Himilcon is on his way from Carthage with two hundred triremes accompanied by rafts, galleys, and transports innumerable. Dionysius makes Euryalus the key of a surprise he prepares for the Carthagenians, for when the latter come sailing into the harbour—“A forest of black masts and dark sails, with transports filled with elephants trumpeting at the smell of land,” and from the West “comes trampling across the plain by the Helorian road and the banks of the Anapus, the Punic army 300,000 strong, with 3,000 horse led by Himilcon in person,”—there stands waiting for them one of the most amazing works ever wrought by the will of a single man.