Still, Messina is not likely to detain any pleasure-tourist long, especially with Taormina, the gem of the island, and one might almost say, indeed, of all Italy, awaiting him at only the distance of a railway journey of some sixty to a hundred miles. The line from Messina to Giardini, the station for Taormina, and the spot whence Garibaldi crossed to Calabria in the autumn of 1860, skirts the sea-coast, burrowing under headlands and spanning dry river-beds for a distance of thirty miles, amid the scenery which has been already viewed from the Straits, but which loses now from its too close neighborhood to the eye. The rock-built town of ancient Taormina is perched upon a steep and craggy bluff some four hundred feet above the railway line, and is approached by an extremely circuitous road of about three miles in length. Short cuts there are for the youthful, the impetuous, and the sound in wind; but even these fortunate persons might do worse than save their breath and restrain their impatience to reach their destination, if only for the sake of the varying panorama which unfolds itself as they ascend from level to level on their winding way. There can be no denying that Taormina stands nobly and confronts the Straits with a simple dignity that many greater and even higher cities might well envy. To see it from a favoring angle of the battlemented road, with the southern sunlight bathing its bright white walls and broken lines of housetops, with the tower of Sant' Agostino traced against the cone of Etna, and the wall that skirts it almost trembling on the utmost verge of the cliff, while at the foot of the declivity the Straits trend southward in "tender, curving lines of creamy spray," to see this is at least to admit that some short cuts are not worth taking, and that the bridle-path up the hillside might well be left to those animals for whose use it was constructed, and who are generally believed to prefer an abridgment of their journey to any conceivable enhancement of its picturesque attractions. [Illustration]