r literature, to which also the world has become
a willing captive; her splendid municipal spirit; a Church, whose
influence has circled the globe, and in which historians, in a spiritual
sense, have seen a survival of Imperial Rome. But here are tales that
every schoolboy hears.

Sicily is reached in a night by steamer from Naples to Palermo, or the
tourist may go by train from Naples to Reggio, and thence by ferry
across the strait to Messina. Its earliest people were contemporaries of
the Etruscans. Phoenicians also made settlements there, as they did in
many parts of the Mediterranean, but these were purely commercial
enterprises. Real civilization in Sicily dates from neither of those
races, but from Dorian and Ionic Greeks, who came perhaps as early as
the founding of Rome--that is, in the seventh or eighth century B.C. The
great cities of the Sicilian Greeks were Syracuse, Segesta and Girgenti,
where still survive colossal remains of their genius. In military and
political senses, the island for 3,000 years has been overrun,
plundered and torn asunder by every race known to Mediterranean waters.
Beside those already named, are Carthaginians under Hannibal, Vandals
under Genseric, Goths under Theodoric, Byzantines under Belisarius,
Saracens from Asia Minor, Normans under Robert Guiscard, German emperors
of the thirteenth century, French Angevine princes (in whose time came
the Sicilian Vespers), Spaniards of the house of Aragon, French under
Napoleon, Austrians of the nineteenth century, and then--that glorious
day when Garibaldi transferred it to the victorious Sardinian king.

The tourist who seeks Greece from northern Europe may go from Trieste by
steamer along the Dalmatian coast (in itself a trip of fine surprizes),
to Cattaro and Corfu, transferring to another steamer for the Piraeus,
the port of Athens; or from Italy by steamer direct from Brindisi, the
ancient Brundusium, whence sailed all Roman expeditions to the East, and
where in retirement once dwelt Cicero. No writer has known where to date
the beginnings of civilization in Greece, but with Mycenae, Tiryns, and
the Minoan palace of Crete laid bare, antiquarians have pointed the way
to dates far older than anything before recorded. The palace of Minos
is ancient enough to make the Homeric age seem modern. With the Dorian
invasion of Greece about 1000 B.C., begins that Greek civilization of
which we have so much authentic knowledge. Dorian influence was