At length we came to a place where there must have been a park gate, though it had now been removed, and replaced by doors of a common character. These were opened on our arrival by an old man with his head tied round in a red handkerchief, and we found ourselves in the midst of a very large grove of lemons, incomparably beautiful, I thought, with their dark green foliage studded with the pale gold globes of the lemons, and the ground at their roots covered with a crop of weed with a leaf like the trefoil, and a brilliant yellow flower somewhat like the musk. From this at length we emerged in front of an enormous palace, built of a yellowy brown stone, with a turret in the centre, and very fine Arab or Norman windows: I am not architect enough to say to which these splendid mouldings belonged. But the palace, which seemed as great or greater than the King's, was sadly decaying, some parts being no longer inhabitable, and the windows of such rooms as were used being filled in till they held modern panes. A more picturesque object it is not easy to imagine, than this huge mellow pile, with its weather-softened turret in the centre, standing under the shadow of the grim brown rock of Monte Griffone, and almost buried in a prodigal wealth of lemon trees. Our coach lumbered in through an old gate into a huge sort of castleyard, from whence we were taken by a dark and very narrow stair into the part inhabited by the family. Between our leaving the miserable old coach, which had brought us, and reaching the salon, where the Prince and his sister were awaiting us, we were handed on by a dozen broken-down servitors, who looked as if they had been taken out of the fields, and thrust into the liveries of other days. But we were mistaken perhaps about the fields, because Donna Rusidda, with a mixture of frankness and pride and shame characteristic of her, soon informed us that the ground up to their very doors was let to a farmer, who also occupied the parts of the palace which had the barred windows, he being more fearful for thieves of his lemons, than they for thieves of the heirlooms which had come down in the family, some of them from the days of the Hohenstaufen Emperor--and the precious tapestries woven on Sicilian silk looms in the fifteenth century which were hanging round the chamber where we were received.