er three steers while they fed; a scantily-clad,
brown woman, who had a distaff in her hand, and spun the flax as she
watched the straying cattle, an example of double industry which the
men who tend herds never imitate. Very likely her ancestors so spun
and tended cattle on the plains of Thessaly. We gave the rigid woman
good-morning, but she did not heed or reply; we made some inquiries as
to paths, but she ignored us; we bade her good-day, and she scowled
at us: she only spun. She was so out of tune with the people, and the
gentle influences of this region, that we could only regard her as an
anomaly,--the representative of some perversity and evil genius, which,
no doubt, lurks here as it does elsewhere in the world. She could not
have descended from either of the groups of the Sirens; for she was not
fascinating enough to be fatal.

I like to look upon these islets or rocks of the Sirens, barren
and desolate, with a few ruins of the Roman time and remains of
the Middle-Age prisons of the doges of Amalfi; but I do not care to
dissipate any illusions by going to them. I remember how the Sirens sat
on flowery meads by the shore and sang, and are vulgarly supposed to
have allured passing mariners to a life of ignoble pleasure, and then
let them perish, hungry with all unsatisfied longings. The bones of
these unfortunates, whitening on the rocks, of which Virgil speaks, I
could not see. Indeed, I think any one who lingers long in this region
will doubt if they were ever there, and will come to believe that the
characters of the Sirens are popularly misconceived. Allowing Ulysses
to be only another name for the sun-god, who appears in myths as Indra,
Apollo, William Tell, the sure-hitter, the great archer, whose arrows
are sunbeams, it is a degrading conception of him that he was obliged to
lash himself to the mast when he went into action with the Sirens, like
Farragut at Mobile, though for a very different reason. We should be
forced to believe that Ulysses was not free from the basest mortal
longings, and that he had not strength of mind to resist them, but must
put himself in durance; as our moderns who cannot control their desires
go into inebriate asylums.

Mr. Ruskin says that "the Sirens are the great constant desires, the
infinite sicknesses of heart, which, rightly placed, give life, and,
wrongly placed, waste it away; so that there are two groups of Sirens,
one noble and saving, as the other is fatal." Unfort