ted me with his card--why had he a card?--which bore the name,
De Luca Fedele. A bright and spirited lad, who seemed to have the best
qualities of his nation; I wish I might live to hear him spoken of as a
man doing honour to Italy.

At this station another travelling companion took the school-boy's
place; a priest, who soon addressed me in courteous talk. He journeyed
only for a short way, and, when alighting, pointed skyward through the
dark (night had fallen) to indicate his mountain parish miles inland.
He, too, offered me his card, adding a genial invitation; I found he
was Parroco (parish priest) of San Nicola at Badolato. I would ask
nothing better than to visit him, some autumn-tide, when grapes are
ripening above the Ionian Sea.

It was a wild night. When the rain at length ceased, lightning flashed
ceaselessly about the dark heights of Aspromonte; later, the moon rose,
and, sailing amid grandly illumined clouds, showed white waves rolling
in upon the beach. Wherever the train stopped, that sea-music was in my
ears--now seeming to echo a verse of Homer, now the softer rhythm of
Theocritus. Think of what one may in day-time on this far southern
shore, its nights are sacred to the poets of Hellas. In rounding Cape
Spartivento, I strained my eyes through the moonlight--unhappily a
waning moon, which had shone with full orb the evening I ascended to
Catanzaro--to see the Sicilian mountains; at length they stood up
darkly against the paler night. There came back to my memory a voyage
at glorious sunrise, years ago, when I passed through the Straits of
Messina, and all day long gazed at Etna, until its cone, solitary upon
the horizon, shone faint and far in the glow of evening--the morrow to
bring me a first sight of Greece.

CHAPTER XVIII

REGGIO

By its natural situation Reggio is marked for an unquiet history. It
was a gateway of Magna Graecia; it lay straight in the track of
conquering Rome when she moved towards Sicily; it offered points of
strategic importance to every invader or defender of the peninsula
throughout the mediaeval wars. Goth and Saracen, Norman, Teuton and
Turk, seized, pillaged, and abandoned, each in turn, this stronghold
overlooking the narrow sea. Then the earthquakes, ever menacing between
Vesuvius and Etna; that of 1783, which wrought destruction throughout
Calabria, laid Reggio in ruins, so that to-day it has the aspect of a
newly-built city, curving its regular streets, amp