as he was riding, and in order to protect the great king from the
fierce rays of the sun, they formed themselves into a living screen to
shelter the royal head. Grateful for this welcome attention, Solomon Ben
David at eventide sent for the king of the Hoopoes to ask him what reward
he would like to receive for this service, and the answer was promptly
made that a crown of pure gold on the head would be acceptable. The Jewish
monarch smiled grimly as he granted the request, whereupon immediately
each bird found his poll decorated with a tuft of pure golden feathers,
and mightily pleased with their new magnificence were the conceited
hoopoes. But alas! the news was quickly spread abroad that there were to
be seen strange birds with plumes of real gold, and the eternal lust of
gain at once set men in quest of the hoopoes, whom they began to slay
wholesale with stones, arrows, and traps in order to obtain the coveted
precious metal they bore on their heads. In despair, the king of the
hoopoes then flew to the monarch sitting on his ivory throne at Jerusalem,
and begged him to change their golden crowns for crests of feathers.
Solomon the Wise smilingly gave the order; at once lovely red and black
feathers took the place of the golden plumes, and the slaughter of the
hoopoes in Palestine forthwith ceased. And the story, argues the recorder
of this lesson upon the folly of personal adornment, must of necessity be
true, for it is certain that the hoopoes bear a crown of feathers upon
their heads unto this day.

Slowly we toil up the last portion of the peak, until we reach the ruined
chapel of St Michael upon its summit, which is still a resort of local
pilgrims, although in these days of doubt and avarice, when "sins are so
many and saints so few," the statue of the Archangel since its removal
from this spot no longer perspires with the sacred dew, which the priests
used to collect with cotton wool on the first day of August and distribute
to the peasants of the district. Like the oil that was once wont to exude
from the blessed relics of St Andrew in the Cathedral of Amalfi, _non c'e
piu_; we may possess motor cars and radium, but we must contrive to exist
without these precious exhibitions of the miraculous.

It would be sheer folly to attempt a full description of that glorious
view, comprising the bays of Gaeta, Naples, and Salerno; of Vesuvius with
his ascending smoky clouds; of the endless chain of the snow-tipped
Abru