ns of his fancy, he laughs
to himself with a hollow reverberating sound. It must, however, have been
in the true spirit of prophecy on the occasion of King Manfred's birth,
that the genius of the Mountain despatched two cloud-forms into the sky
(so the unabashed old chroniclers gravely relate), one having the
appearance of a warrior armed cap-a-pie, and the other that of a fully
vested priest. The affrighted gazers below, struck with the strange
phenomenon, beheld the two figures sway towards each other and finally
become locked together in deadly aerial combat, until all resemblance to
human shape had vanished from the pair. Then, after an interval of time,
men perceived the cloudy mass once more assume a mortal shape, and a huge
towering priest with flowing robes and tiara on head was left in solitary
and victorious possession of the sky. The Churchman had swallowed up the
soldier; the Pontiff had vanquished the King; it was a true premonition of
the fatal field of Benevento, which saw the ultimate triumph of the Papal
over the Imperial cause.

But if the near presence of the burning mountain has tended to make the
inhabitants of its immediate zone the slaves of superstitious awe, the
disasters of generations have likewise imbued them with a spirit of
fatalism, that appears even stronger than their outward show of credulity.
Life is not so sweet nor so dear apparently to these children of the
South, but that they can afford to take their chance of disturbance or
death with a true philosophic calm. The fisher-folk and maccaroni workers
of Resina, Portici and the two Torres have, it is true, little to lose; a
small boat can at the last moment easily convey their families and slender
stock of household furniture to a place of temporary safety, and when the
danger is over-past, the same shallop can bring back the refugees and
their belongings. But with the husbandmen the case is different. Not only
has he to fear the actual stream of lava, which may or may not overwhelm
his house and farm in its slow inevitable course, but there are also the
showers of hot ashes and of scalding water that will frizzle up in a few
seconds every green blade and leaf upon his tiny domain, for which he pays
an enormous rental, sometimes as much as L12 sterling an acre. Yet the
_contadino_ takes his chances with a seraphic resignation that we do not
usually attribute to the southern temperament. After the eruption of 1872,
which covered the ric