But Master Will was more profitably engaged. The Prince of Favara, as is so honourably often the case with Sicilian nobles, was a great amateur in the antiquities of his country, and the ruins lately laid bare at Forum Pompeji and Herculaneum were of special interest to him, for he had, among the beggarly remnants of a patrimony which had come down to him, a hill some ten miles from Palermo and two from the court suburb of Bagheria, a bluff barren hill which had been the site of the ancient city of Soluntum founded by the Phœnicians, where the men who tended the vines and olives were for ever turning up some fragment of ancient-world temples or dwellings. He was too poor to have the hill excavated as he desired; indeed, the very vineyards and olive-gardens were leased to a creditor, strictly bound down to do no digging above what was necessary for trenching the trees. The Prince had dreams of laying bare a Sicilian Pompeji when he should have made his fortune, which he was not like to do except by marriage with an heiress, a commodity not too plentiful at the Neapolitan Court. But he was not a Royal favourite, though attached to the Court; and further, any money which Ferdinand I. of the Two Sicilies bestowed upon his favourites was expected to be duly wasted in riotous living. Well, the Prince of Favara was for showing the city as it should be shown to his late enemy, Will; and his sister--who had come under his protection--was as attached to their buried city on the hill, and therefore to buried cities generally, as himself; and I was, as ever, with Will. And looking up to Will as I did, it seemed his plain right that he should walk with the beautiful Donna Rusidda and I with the Prince, lagging bravely. I had, moreover, I think I may say without vanity, more book-brains than Will, who was a man of action and perhaps a little narrow--which the Prince was not long in learning. For Will was not of the kind who can simulate by a fire of small questions interest in a matter which does not come into his thoughts. So the Prince had perforce to address all his information to me. He had, since we were away fighting at the Nile, picked up a very little English from My Lady, who had been interested in him on account of the story of his _duello_. But it was so little that his entire attention was necessary for explaining the smallest point to me. But the exercise gave him much pleasure. Unlike the Englishman, the Italian loves to adventure in a foreign language. We wandered down to a fine house near the ancient burial ground, which was, according to the Roman wont, outside the city gate upon the road which led to Rome. This the Prince told me, pointing it as an instance of the imperial sentiment of his ancestors. "And this dwelling," he said, "was the Villa of no less a personage than Cicero."