"I say, old man, shall we let the 2.46 go to thunder?"

I chuckled to myself. "But the Turners?"

"They be blowed, we can tell them we missed the train."

"That is just exactly what we shall do," I said, pulling out my watch,
"unless we start for the station right now."

But Tom drew an acanthus leaf across his face and showed no signs of
moving; so I filled my pipe again, and we missed the train.

As the sun dropped lower towards the sea, changing its silver line to
gold, we pulled ourselves together, and for an hour or more sketched
vigorously; but the mood was not on us. It was "too jolly fine to waste
time working," as Tom said; so we started off to explore the single
street of the squalid town of Pesto that was lost within the walls of
dead Poseidonia. It was not a pretty village,--if you can call a
rut-riven lane and a dozen houses a village,--nor were the inhabitants
thereof reassuring in appearance. There was no sign of a
church,--nothing but dirty huts, and in the midst, one of two stories,
rejoicing in the name of _Albergo del Sole_, the first story of which
was a black and cavernous smithy, where certain swarthy knaves, looking
like banditti out of a job, sat smoking sulkily.

"We might stay here all night," said Tom, grinning askance at this
choice company; but his suggestion was not received with enthusiasm.

Down where the lane from the station joined the main road stood the only
sign of modern civilization,--a great square structure, half villa, half
fortress, with round turrets on its four corners, and a ten-foot wall
surrounding it. There were no windows in its first story, so far as we
could see, and it had evidently been at one time the fortified villa of
some Campanian noble. Now, however, whether because brigandage had been
stamped out, or because the villa was empty and deserted, it was no
longer formidable; the gates of the great wall hung sagging on their
hinges, brambles growing all over them, and many of the windows in the
upper story were broken and black. It was a strange place, weird and
mysterious, and we looked at it curiously. "There is a story about that
place," said Tom, with conviction.

It was growing late: the sun was near the edge of the sea as we walked
down the ivy-grown walls of the vanished city for the last time, and as
we turned back, a red flush poured from the west, and painted the Doric
temples in pallid rose against the evanescent purple of the Apennines.
Already