ome are mounted on Spanish mules, all mixed together
freely amidst handsome and numerous equipages; and the whole is
backed by a fine row of houses opposite the sea, built after the
fashion of our terraces and crescents at watering-places. And
finally, that blue _aequor_, as it now deserves to be termed, studded
over with thunny boats and coasting craft with the haze latine sail,
that we should be sorry to trust in British hands, is walled in by
cliffs so bold, so rugged, and standing out so beautifully in relief,
that for a moment we cannot choose but envy the citizen of
_Panormus_. But we may not tarry even here; _we have more things_ to
see, and every day is getting hotter than the last.

JOURNEY TO SEGESTE.

Leaving Palermo early, we pass _Monreale_ in our way to the Doric
columns of _Segeste_, and find ourselves, before the heat of day has
reached its greatest intensity, at a considerable elevation above the
plain on which the capital stands, amidst mountains which, except in
the difference of their vegetation, remind us not a little of the
configuration of certain wild parts of the Highlands, where Ben
Croachin flings his dark shadow across Loch Awe. Indeed, we were
thinking of this old and favourite fishing haunt with much
complacency, when two men suddenly came forth from behind the bristly
aloes and the impenetrable cactus--ill-looking fellows were they;
but, moved by the kindest intentions for our safety, they offer to
conduct us through the remainder of the defile. This service our
hired attendant from Palermo declined, and we push on unmolested to
Partenico, our halting-place during the heat of the day. It is a town
of some extent, large enough to afford two fountains of a certain
pretension, but execrably dirty within. Twelve thousand inhabitants
has Partenico, and five churches. Out of its five locandas, who shall
declare the worst? Of that in which we had first taken refuge, (as,
in a snow-storm on the Alps, any _roof_ is Paradise,) we were obliged
to quit the shelter, and walk at _noon_, at _midsummer_, and in
_Sicily_, a good mile _up_ a main street, which, beginning in
habitations of the dimensions of our almshouses, ends in a few huts
intolerably revolting, about which troops of naked children defy
vermin, and encrust themselves in filth. At one door we could not
help observing that worst form of _scabies_, the _gale a grosses
bulles;_ so we had got, it appeared, from _Scylla_ into _Charybdis_,
a