usion, partly by reason of its extreme
beauty, partly, it may be, because the present owners are more than
charming and gracious in their pressing hospitality, Sta. Catarina seems
to preserve an element of the poetic, almost magical; and as I drove
with the Cavaliere Valguanera one evening in March out of Palermo, along
the garden valley of the Oreto, then up the mountain side where the
warm light of the spring sunset swept across from Monreale, lying golden
and mellow on the luxuriant growth of figs, and olives, and
orange-trees, and fantastic cacti, and so up to where the path of the
convent swung off to the right round a dizzy point of cliff that reached
out gaunt and gray from the olives below,--as I drove thus in the balmy
air, and saw of a sudden a vision of creamy walls and orange roof,
draped in fantastic festoons of roses, with a single curving palm-tree
stuck black and feathery against the gold sunset, it is hardly to be
wondered at that I should slip into a mood of visionary enjoyment,
looking for a time on the whole thing as the misty phantasm of a summer
dream.

The Cavaliere had introduced himself to us,--Tom Rendel and me,--one
morning soon after we reached Palermo, when, in the first bewilderment
of architects in this paradise of art and colour, we were working nobly
at our sketches in that dream of delight, the Capella Palatina. He was
himself an amateur archaeologist, he told us, and passionately devoted to
his island; so he felt impelled to speak to anyone whom he saw
appreciating the almost--and in a way fortunately--unknown beauties of
Palermo. In a little time we were fully acquainted, and talking like the
oldest friends. Of course he knew acquaintances of Rendel's,--someone
always does: this time they were officers on the tubby U. S. S.
_Quinebaug_, that, during the summer of 1888, was trying to uphold the
maritime honour of the United States in European waters. Luckily for us,
one of the officers was a kind of cousin of Rendel's, and came from
Baltimore as well, so, as he had visited at the Cavaliere's place, we
were soon invited to do the same. It was in this way that, with the luck
that attends Rendel wherever he goes, we came to see something of
domestic life in Italy, and that I found myself involved in another of
those adventures for which I naturally sought so little.

I wonder if there is any other place in Sicily so faultless as Sta.
Catarina? Taormina is a paradise, an epitome of all th