feless as the century in which it flourished.

[1] Nearly all cities have their own distinctive colour.
That of Venice is a pearly white suggestive of every hue
in delicate abeyance, and that of Florence is a sober
brown. Palermo displays a rich yellow ochre passing at the
deepest into orange, and at the lightest into primrose.
This is the tone of the soil, of sun-stained marble, and
of the rough ashlar masonry of the chief buildings.
Palermo has none of the glaring whiteness of Naples, nor
yet of that particoloured gradation of tints which adds
gaiety to the grandeur of Genoa.

Yet there, in a side chapel near the western door, stand the
porphyry sarcophagi which shrine the bones of the Hautevilles and
their representatives. There sleeps King Roger--'Dux strenuus et
primus Rex Siciliae'--with his daughter Constance in her purple chest
beside him. Henry VI. and Frederick II. and Constance of Aragon
complete the group, which surpasses for interest all sepulchral
monuments--even the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona--except only,
perhaps, the statues of the nave of Innspruck. Very sombre and
stately are these porphyry resting-places of princes born in the
purple, assembled here from lands so distant--from the craggy
heights of Hohenstauffen, from the green orchards of Cotentin, from
the dry hills of Aragon. They sleep, and the centuries pass by. Rude
hands break open the granite lids of their sepulchres, to find
tresses of yellow hair and fragments of imperial mantles,
embroidered with the hawks and stags the royal hunter loved. The
church in which they lie changes with the change of taste in
architecture and the manners of successive ages. But the huge stone
arks remain unmoved, guarding their freight of mouldering dust
beneath gloomy canopies of stone that temper the sunlight as it
streams from the chapel windows.

_SYRACUSE AND GIRGENTI_

The traveller in Sicily is constantly reminded of classical history
and literature. While tossing, it may be, at anchor in the port of
Trapani, and wondering when the tedious Libeccio will release him,
he must perforce remember that here AEneas instituted the games for
Anchises. Here Mnestheus and Gyas and Sergestus and Cloanthus raced
their galleys: on yonder little isle the Centaur struck; and that
was the rock which received the dripping Menoetes:--

Illum et labentem Teucri et risere natantem,
Et salsos rident revomentem p