It was this especial claim which drew me and my two companions, members of the American School at Athens, to Catania. We desired to become as familiar with western Hellas as we had already become with eastern Hellas. We came rather too late in the year; not that physical comfort is an element for great consideration in such a land; it is rather the psychological aspect which I have in mind. Theocritus has thrown such associations of spring over Sicily that the traveller feels that he ought to be there with "pulses thronged with the fulness of the spring," which can hardly be the case in the great heat of June. Perhaps our bicycles might seem to some out of time with Theocritus and Pindar, and we did not try to throw any glamour of poetry over them. But they were vastly convenient. We had sent forward our heavy luggage to Palermo, and they carried all that we needed for two weeks. While they were not a substitute for trains, they freed us from servile dependence on trains. If a train went our way at our time, as it did from Syracuse to Girgenti, we took it. But finding no railroad connection between Girgenti and Selinus, except such as took us across to the north side of the island and then back again to the south side, we passed the intervening space in a direct line along the southern shore, saving both time and money. When we were at Syracuse we wished to visit the river Asinaros, where the fugitive Athenian army was brought to bay and slaughtered and captured. The five o'clock train was too early. Who likes to take a morning meal at half-past four with the fear of losing a train before his eyes? Discomfort if not dyspepsia hovers over him. The alternative of a later train involved giving up the day to this excursion, and we needed that day for something else. We took a comfortable meal, and, starting at six o'clock, at a quarter past eight were on the banks of the Asinaros, and by the aid of a train were back in Syracuse at ten o'clock, ready for a good day's work. Our beginning was inauspicious. A chapter of small accidents on the lava-paved streets of Catania kept us hovering around a shop presided over by a woman in which sewing-machines and a few other miscellaneous machines, including bicycles, were repaired. Here, in a subordinate position, was one of those mechanics who know how to do things as if by instinct, a not unworthy successor of Hephæstos, who used to do business on a grander scale hard by, with Ætna for his forge. Your real mechanic, from Tubal Cain down, is always the right man in the right place. A deft-handed New Hampshire mechanic once said to me, after putting some dislocated object to rights in less than five minutes, "I shall have to charge you ten cents for doing the job and fifteen cents for knowing how." It struck me as a good expression of the claims of the guild.