ging has recently been
done, and things of interest have been found; but discovery on a wide
scale is still to be attempted.

Lenormant praises the landscape hereabouts as of "incomparable beauty";
unfortunately I saw it in a sunless day, and at unfavourable moments I
was strongly reminded of the Essex coast--grey, scrubby fiats, crossed
by small streams, spreading wearily seaward. One had only to turn
inland to correct this mood; the Calabrian mountains, even without
sunshine, had their wonted grace. Moreover, cactus and agave, frequent
in the foreground, preserved the southern character of the scene. The
great plain between the hills and the sea grows very impressive; so
silent it is, so mournfully desolate, so haunted with memories of
vanished glory. I looked at the Crathis--the Crati of Cosenza--here
beginning to spread into a sea-marsh; the waters which used to flow
over golden sands, which made white the oxen, and sunny-haired the
children, that bathed in them, are now lost amid a wilderness poisoned
by their own vapours.

The railway station, like all in this region, was set about with
eucalyptus. Great bushes of flowering rosemary scented the air, and a
fine cassia tree, from which I plucked blossoms, yielded a subtler
perfume. Our lunch was not luxurious; I remember only, as at all worthy
of Sybaris, a palatable white wine called Muscato dei Saraceni.
Appropriate enough amid this vast silence to turn one's thoughts to the
Saracens, who are so largely answerable for the ages of desolation that
have passed by the Ionian Sea.

Then on for Taranto, where we arrived in the afternoon. Meaning to stay
for a week or two I sought a pleasant room in a well-situated hotel,
and I found one with a good view of town and harbour. The Taranto of
old days, when it was called Taras, or later Tarentum, stood on a long
peninsula, which divides a little inland sea from the great sea
without. In the Middle Ages the town occupied only the point of this
neck of land, which, by the cutting of an artificial channel, had been
made into an island: now again it is spreading over the whole of the
ancient site; great buildings of yellowish-white stone, as ugly as
modern architect can make them, and plainly far in excess of the actual
demand for habitations, rise where Phoenicians and Greeks and Romans
built after the nobler fashion of their times. One of my windows looked
towards the old town, with its long sea-wall where fishermen's nets