To Corsica belong a few little island-reefs of the most irregular form, which lie scattered in the strait quite near, and are called San Bainzo, Cavallo, and Lavezzi. They consist of granite. The Romans had worked quarries on them, to procure pillars for their temples and palaces. The positions occupied by their workshops are still easily discernible; even the coals in the old Roman smithies have left their traces. Enormous, half-hewn pillars still lie on these rocks—two of them on San Bainzo—and other blocks of stone shaped by Roman chisels. It is impossible now to say for what building in Rome they may have been destined; no one can tell what terrible panic it was which suddenly drove the quarrymen and masons from their solitary workshop on the sea, leaving the labour of their hands unfinished. It may be that the sea overwhelmed them; it may be that they were massacred by the wild Corsican, or the fierce Sardinian. It surprises me that there is no legend current of a ghostly Roman workshop; for I myself have seen in the moonlight the dead workmen rise out of the sea, clad in Roman togas—grave men, broad-browed, with aquiline noses, and deep-set eyes. Silently they applied themselves to the two pillars, and after a ghostly fashion began to beat and chisel them. One stood erect among them, and, with outstretched finger, gave directions. I heard him say in Latin—"This pillar will be one of the fairest in the golden palace of Nero. Quick, comrades, make haste; for if you are not ready within forty days, we shall all be cast to the wild beasts." Fain would I have called out to him, "O Artemion, and you other dead men! the palace of Nero has long since vanished from the face of the earth—why hew pillars for it still? Go, sleep in your graves!" But just as I was about to utter this, the Latin words became Italian, and I could not. And it is owing to this circumstance alone, that the spirits of those old Romans still busy themselves unceasingly with the pillars in that ghostly workshop; and night after night they rise up out of the water, and strike and chisel with restless haste; but as soon as the cocks crow in Bonifazio, the pale and shadowy forms spring back into the sea. I threw again one long last look on the wide-extended Sardinian coast, on the land of Gallura, and thought of the beautiful Enzius, the Emperor Frederick's son. He, too, once was, and was moreover a king. A few months ago, I stood one evening in his prison at Bologna. A puppet theatre was erected near it, and across the still, large square sounded loudly the voice of Pulcinella. The world is round, and history a circle like the individual life of men. CHAPTER X. THE CAVES OF BONIFAZIO.