three hundred years after the statue of Venus was made, S. Paul,
being on his way to Rome, was shipwrecked at Malta, where he remained
three months. He sailed away in the _Castor and Pollux_ of Alexandria,
landed at Siracusa and tarried there three days. We know what S. Paul
must have thought of Diana from the account of what happened at Ephesus,
where the goddess was also worshipped; it is probable that he was among
those who disbelieved in the eternal virginity of Arethusa, and he surely
must have disapproved of the frequent visits of Venus and Cupid. In time
the people of Ortigia professed themselves converted to his views and
made a change, but they made it in a half-hearted way; for instead of
pulling down the heathen temple, so that not one stone should be left
upon another, they allowed the Doric columns to remain and merely filled
up the intercolumniations with building material and baptised it into the
Christian faith with a coat of whitewash and a new name. In other
respects they went on very much as before.

Saracens visited the nymph, and Normans; Egyptians, Germans, Goths,
Spaniards, Frenchmen, Albanians all came and all bequeathed some record
of their coming. Many of them left their autographs written one over the
other upon the forms and features of the ancestors of those who still
have their dwelling in her island.

Lord Nelson on his way to the Nile, where the papyrus came from, sailed
into the Great Harbour with his fleet and did business with the nymph.
He wrote to Sir William and Lady Hamilton:

Thanks to your exertions we have victualled and watered; and surely,
having watered at the fountain of Arethusa we must have victory.

What a picture these words call up of Arethusa welcoming Nelson's jolly
tars! They are coming in their pinnaces and filling their barrels and
kegs with the waters of the sacred spring and, as they row back across
the harbour to the ships, one can almost hear them singing of "Tom
Bowling," "Black-eyed Susan" and "The Roast Beef of Old England."

I have myself seen the German Emperor visiting Arethusa. His yacht, the
_Hohenzollern_, was in the Great Harbour, and one afternoon I watched his
suite being put ashore in little boats, like Nelson's sailors, only there
was no singing, and presently he came in a little boat and they all drove
away in carriages to the Cappuccini, where I read in the _Giornale di
Sicilia_ that they inspected the latomia and took tea. T