their son
Roger Bursa and their grandson William, in whom the direct line of the
Great Adventurer became extinct. Many stories are told by the old
chroniclers of this bold intrepid princess (not always to her
credit)--daughter of the last Lombard prince Gisulf of Salerno and wife of
her father's supplanter, whose humble Norman ancestry she affected to
despise. But despite her reputation for cruelty and even for murder,
Sigilgaita was a faithful wife and a brave woman, with a character not
unlike that of our own Queen Margaret of Anjou; and it seems strange that
so devoted and well mated a pair as herself and Robert Guiscard should be
separated in death, he at Venosa and she in the cathedral of her husband's
foundation.

Passing out of the silent church into the warm light of eventide, by steep
alleys and by stony footpaths we gradually mount upwards towards the
ruined castle that commands a lofty position with an all-embracing view of
the bay and its encircling mountains. The crumbling fragment of the old
palace of Salerno differs but little in appearance from any one of those
innumerable dilapidated piles of the Middle Ages with which Southern Italy
is so thickly studded, yet coming fresh from visiting Guiscard's cathedral
and Hildebrand's last resting-place, we find it comparatively easy to
conjure up some recollections of its past, so as to invest its crumbling
red-hued walls with a spell of interest. These broken apertures were
surely once the windows through which the dying Pope must have wearily
glanced upon the sun-smitten waves and violet-shadowed hills that we
behold to-day; here in this embrasure, long despoiled of its marble seat,
must have brooded the fierce and unscrupulous Sigilgaita, thinking of how
best to rid herself of her step-son Bohemond, in order that her own
children might inherit their father's realms. The ghosts of princes and
popes are around us, yet the only living inhabitant of the roofless castle
is the ragged little goat-herd, whose unsavoury charges are cropping the
short grass that covers the site of the banqueting hall, where Norman
knights and Italian barons once caroused in the crusading days of long
ago. We seat ourselves on the dry sward in a sun-warmed angle of the
ruins, where an almond tree that has sprouted from the rubble sends down
from time to time upon our heads a tiny shower of pale pink blossoms at
the bidding of the soft evening breeze. At our feet are masses of the dark