At length the headlands of the noble bay of Tarentum rose above the horizon. While we were running with the speed of a lapwing, the captain, to our surprise, shortened sail. I soon discovered that no philosophy was perfect; that even the optimist thought that daylight might be worse than useless, and that a blot had been left on creation in the shape of a custom-house officer. Night fell at last; the moon, to which our captain had taken a sudden aversion, was as cloudy as he could desire, and we rushed in between the glimmering watch-towers on the Iapygian and Lacinian promontories. The glow of light along the waters soon pointed out where the luxurious citizens of Tarentum were enjoying the banquet in their barges and villas. Next came the hum of the great city, whose popular boast was, like that of later times, that it had more festivals than days in the year. [Sidenote: Salathiel Lands] But the trierarch’s often-told delight at finding himself free to rove among the indulgences of his favorite shore had lost its poignancy; and with a firmness which set the Stoic in a rage, the Epicurean in a state of rebellion, and the whole tribe of our sages in a temper of mere mortal remonstrance, he resisted alike the remonstrance and the allurement, and sullenly cast anchor in the center of the bay. It was not until song and feast had died, and all was hushed, that he stole with the slightest possible noise to the back of the mole, and sending us below, disburdened his conscience and the hold of the good ship _Ganymede_. I had no time to give to the glories of Tarentum. Nero’s approach hurried my departure. The centurion who had me in charge trembled at the idea of delay, and we rode through the midst of three hundred thousand sleepers in streets of marble and ranks of statues, as silently and swiftly as if we had been the ghosts of their ancestors. When the day broke we found ourselves among the Lucanian hills, then no desert, but crowded with population and bright with the memorials of Italian opulence and taste. From the inn where we halted to change horses, the Tarentine gulf spread broad and bold before the eye.