m poor or
rich, at home or abroad, it is seldom that medical men walk off so
magnificently.

EXCURSION TO EPIPOLAE.

The country about Syracuse is neither grand nor beautiful; but the
ground is _classic ground_, and Sicily has not been brought within the
reach of an intercourse which, while it polishes and confers substantial
benefits, removes the sacred rust of antiquity. The Hybla hills, as
hills, are not equal to the Surrey hills as one sees then from one's
window at Kensington; but Hybla is Hybla, and here we eat the honey and
sip the wine of the soil. Yonder plain before our breakfast-table is
plain enough, and promises little; but that small insignificant stream
is the _Anapus_, those columns belonged to a temple of Jupiter, that
white tower, five miles off, marks _Epipolae_, the snow-capped Etna is
the background of the picture, and the bay at our feet once bore that
Athenian navy which left the Piraeus to make as great a mistake as we did
in our American war. We rowed across that bay to the mouth of the
Anapus, and penetrated up the stream to the paper manufactory, from real
papyrus, on its banks. The vestiges of a temple of Diana, converted into
a monastery, and the nearly perfect remains of that amphitheatre which
Cicero pronounced the largest in the world, are not to be seen in every
morning's walk! Of Archimedes, without being able to fix his proper tomb
among so many, the _name_ here is enough. One ought to be able to
conjure with it; the genius that concentrated the sun of Syracuse on the
hostile anchorage, was of no common measure. We spent our day on a visit
of the deepest interest, up at _Epipolae_ (_i.e._, the position _on or
over the city_, as Thucydides expresses it,) the acropolis, in fact, of
Syracuse, and at about the same distance from the town itself as Athens
is from Piraeus. In order to do this commodiously, we allowed ourselves
to be suspended between two mules in a very narrow watchman's box,
_lettiga_, (the ancient _lectiga_, you will say--no: here there is
nothing for it but an erect spine.) The see-saw motion is unpleasant as
well as unusual; the mules, though docile, have not the _savoir faire_
of a couple of Dublin or Edinburgh chairmen. You must sit _quite_ in the
middle, or run the perpetual chance of capsizing. A little alarming,
also, is it to look out on the stone-strewn furrow, over which the mules
carry you safely enough; and when you have become reconciled to the
oscillation