d her lap with bluebells, quite forgot the leaping kids, and
piping Cyclops, and cool summer caves, and yellow honey, and black
ivy, and sweet vine, and water cold as Alpine snow. Down the swift
streamlet she danced laughingly, and made herself once more bitter
with the sea. But Polyphemus remained,--hungry, sad, gazing on the
barren sea, and piping to the mockery of its waves.

Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a little
sandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown with
English primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with its
mediaeval castle and the motto on its walls, _Tempora labuntur
tacitisque senescimus annis_. A true motto for the town, where the
butcher comes but once a week, and where men and boys, and dogs, and
palms, and lemon-trees grow up and flourish and decay in the same
hollow of the sunny mountain-side. Into the hard conglomerate of the
hill the town is built; house walls and precipices mortised into one
another, dovetailed by the art of years gone by, and riveted by
age. The same plants grow from both alike--spurge, cistus, rue, and
henbane, constant to the desolation of abandoned dwellings. From the
castle you look down on roofs, brown tiles and chimney-pots, set one
above the other like a big card-castle. Each house has its foot on a
neighbour's neck, and its shoulder set against the native stone. The
streets meander in and out, and up and down, overarched and balconied,
but very clean. They swarm with children, healthy, happy, little
monkeys, who grow fat on salt fish and yellow polenta, with oil and
sun _ad libitum_.

At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of the
gaming-house at Monaco, that Armida's garden of the nineteenth
century. It is the sunniest and most sheltered spot of all the coast.
Long ago Lucan said of Monaco, '_Non Corus in illum jus habet aut
Zephyrus_;' winter never comes to nip its tangled cactuses, and
aloes, and geraniums. The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves;
tall palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music of
the softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridors
and sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm;
without, are olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers. But
the witch herself holds her high court and never-ending festival of
sin in the painted banquet-halls and among the green tables.

Let us leave this scene and turn with the cou