thusa's fountain in the town
before driving them into perhaps the most wonderful garden in the
world--the double garden of the Villa Politi. It is double because the
heights, on a level with the white balconied hotel, bloom with flowers
and billow with waving olive trees; while down below, far below, lie the
haunted quarries, starry now in their tragic shadows with the golden
spheres of oranges. The latomia forms a subterranean garden; when the
brilliant flower-beds above are scintillating with noonday heat, down
there, under the orange trees with their white blossoms, it is always
cool and dim, with a green light like a garden under the sea.

The quarry is deep, with sheer white walls overgrown with ivy and purple
bouganvillia. It is of enormous extent, winding irregularly, crossed
here and there with a slight bridge, and the hotel stands on the very
edge. Far away lies Siracusa, a streak of pearl against the deep indigo
of the sea. We went down into the latomia and wandered into its most
secret places. But when we came upon a pile of skulls Aunt Mary beat a
retreat. The ghosts of the tortured Greeks haunted the place, she vowed,
and lest she should be lost in the labyrinth of the quarry, she had to
be escorted up to the world of mortals.

Next day we did most of the things that Miss Randolph had set her heart
on, but not all. My alluring picture of Taormina consoled her for what
she had to miss, and she consented to be torn away on the following
morning.

Our drive to-day has been a scamper through Paradise. The road we took
wound through orange groves, the sea lay glittering below us, mountains
towering above, each hill-top crested with a ruin which had crumbled to
decay when the world was young. My Goddess said that she had never known
how much truer than history mythology was until this magic morning. Why,
we saw the stones that Polyphemus threw after Ulysses, and the scene of
Acis' love, and always before us, beckoning us on, was the white,
hovering cone of Etna.

At last we struck the little station of Giardini on the coast, the
nearest to Taormina, which lies some hundreds of feet above on a high
shoulder of the mountains. An exquisite road, engineered in gradual
curves, winds upwards along the mountain breast, and as usual the Napier
took it at an easy ten miles an hour, and could have done it faster if I
had let her. The view grew fairer and fairer as we mounted, and the
coast line disclosed itself to nort