essful than the poor little
Neapolitan revolution which he was pleased to satirize. Somehow or
other, Victor Emanuel is, at this hour, king of Naples. Coward or not,
this fine fellow of a fisherman did not flinch. It is my private opinion
that he was not nearly as much afraid of the enterprise as I was. I made
this observation at the moment with some satisfaction, sent Frank's man
up to my lodgings with a note ordering my own traps sent down, and in an
hour we were stretching out, under the twilight, across the little bay.

No! I spare you the voyage. Sybaris is what we are after, all this time,
if we can only get there. Very easy it would be for me to give you cheap
scholarship from the AEneid, about Palinurus and Scylla and Charybdis.
Neither Scylla nor Charybdis bothered me,--as we passed wing-wing
between them before a smart north wind. I had a little Hunter's Virgil
with me, and read the whole voyage,--and confused Battista utterly by
trying to make him remember something about Palinuro, of whom he had
never heard. It was much as I afterwards asked my negro waiter at Fort
Monroe about General Washington at Yorktown. "Never heard of him,
sir,--was he in the Regular army?" So Battista thought Palinuro must
have fished in the Italian fleet, with which the Sicilian boatmen were
not well acquainted. Messina made no objections to us. Perhaps, if the
sloop of war which lay there had known who was lying in the boat under
her guns, I might not be writing these words to-day. Battista went
ashore, got lemons, macaroni, hard bread, polenta, for themselves, the
_Giornale di Messina_ for me, and more Tunisian; and, not to lose that
splendid breeze, we cracked on all day, passed Reggio, hugged the shore
bravely, though it was rough, ran close under those cliffs which are the
very end of the Apennines,--will it shock the modest reader if I say the
very toe-nails of the Italian foot?--hauled more and more eastward, made
Spartivento blue in the distance, made it purple, made it brown, made it
green, still running admirably,--ten knots an hour we must have got
between four and five that afternoon,--and by the time the lighthouse at
Spartivento was well ablaze we were abreast of it, and might begin to
haul more northward, so that, though we had a long course before us, we
should at last be sailing almost directly towards our voyage's end,
Gallipoli.

At that moment--as in any sea often happens, if you come out from the
more land-lock