ee I never
drank. Then I descended into the gloom of the street. The familiar
odours breathed upon me with pungent freshness, wafted hither and
thither on a mountain breeze. A glance upwards at the narrow strip of
sky showed a grey-coloured dawn, prelude, I feared, of a dull day.

Evidently I was not the only traveller departing; on the truck just
laden I saw somebody else's luggage, and at the same moment there came
forth a man heavily muffled against the air, who, like myself, began to
look about for the porter. We exchanged greetings, and on our walk to
the station I learned that my companion, also bound for Taranto, had
been detained by illness for several days at the _Lionetti_, where, he
bitterly complained, the people showed him no sort of attention. He was
a commercial traveller, representing a firm of drug merchants in North
Italy, and for his sins (as he put it) had to make the southern journey
every year; he invariably suffered from fever, and at certain
places--of course, the least civilized--had attacks which delayed him
from three days to a week. He loathed the South, finding no
compensation whatever for the miseries of travel below Naples; the
inhabitants he reviled with exceeding animosity. Interested by the
doleful predicament of this vendor of drugs (who dosed himself very
vigorously), I found him a pleasant companion during the day; after our
lunch he seemed to shake off the last shivers of his malady, and was as
sprightly an Italian as one could wish to meet--young, sharp-witted,
well-mannered, and with a pleasing softness of character.

We lunched at Sybaris; that is to say, at the railway station now so
called, though till recently it bore the humbler name of Buffaloria.
The Italians are doing their best to revive the classical place-names,
where they have been lost, and occasionally the incautious traveller is
much misled. Of Sybaris no stone remains above ground; five hundred
years before Christ it was destroyed by the people of Croton, who
turned the course of the river Crathis so as to whelm the city's ruins.
Francois Lenormant, whose delightful book, _La Grande Grece_, was my
companion on this journey, believed that a discovery far more wonderful
and important than that of Pompeii awaits the excavator on this site;
he held it certain that here, beneath some fifteen feet of alluvial
mud, lay the temples and the streets of Sybaris, as on the day when
Crathis first flowed over them. A little dig