It was late in September when I reached Catania, on the eastern side of Sicily. The city lies at the foot of Mt. Ætna on the edge of the sea. Above it looms the vast bulk of the volcano, its slopes girdled with gardens and vineyards that mount, one terrace above the other, until they lose themselves in the clouds. A wide and fertile valley below the city to the south, through which the railway descends from the mountain to the sea, seemed, as did Mt. Ætna itself, like one vast vineyard. This was the more noticeable and interesting because, at the time I reached there, the harvest was in progress; the vineyards were dotted with women carrying baskets; the wine presses were busy, and the air was filled with the fumes of the fermenting grape juice. Although it was Sunday morning and the bells in a hundred churches were calling the people to prayers, there was very little of the Sunday quiet I had somehow expected to meet. Most of the shops were open; in every part of the city men were sitting in their doorways or on the pavement in front of their little cell-like houses, busily at work at their accustomed crafts. Outside the southern gate of the city a thrifty merchant had set up a hasty wine shop, in order to satisfy the thirst of the crowds of people who were passing in and out of the city and also, perhaps, to escape the tax which the city imposes upon all sorts of provisions that enter the city from the surrounding country. Country wine was selling here at a few pennies a litre--I have forgotten the exact sum--and crowds of people from the city celebrated, something after the ancient custom of the country, I suppose, the annual harvest of the grapes. Out of the southern gate of the city, which leads into the fertile vine-clad plain, a dusty and perspiring procession--little two-wheeled carts, beautifully carved and decorated, carrying great casks of grape juice, little donkeys with a pigskin filled with wine on either flank and a driver trotting along beside them--pushed and crowded its way into the city. At the same time a steady stream of peasants on foot, or city people in carriages, mingling with the carts and pack-animals, poured out of the gate along the dusty highway, dividing and dwindling, until the stream lost itself among the cactus hedges that mark the winding country roads.