in a few days you will die." And to make an end of St. Elia
with Crisione, let me record here the simple Daniele's last act of piety
to his master. It is little that in such company he fought with devils,
or that after he had written with much labour a beautiful Psalter, the
old monk bade him fling it and worldly pride together over the cliff
into a lake. Such episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, by
making a circuit of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously unwet,
and only his worldly pride remained at the lake's bottom. But it was a
mind singularly inventive of penance that led the dying saint to charge
poor Daniele to bear the corpse on his back a long way over the
mountains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult thing to do.
Other survivors of the sack of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione,
watched their opportunity, and, at a moment when the garrison was weak,
entered, seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the
Greek emperor once more. He could not maintain war with the Saracens,
but by a treaty made with them he secured his faithful Taorminians in
the possession of the city. After forty years of peace under this treaty
it was again besieged for several months, and fell on Christmas night.
Seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors
into slavery in Africa. Greek troops, however, soon retook the city in
a campaign that opened brilliantly in Sicily only to close in swift
disaster; but for five years longer Taormina sustained continual siege,
and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of its citizens and the
now thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic victory, we may well
believe that, though it remained the seat of a governor, little of the
city was left except its memory. Its name even was changed to Moezzia.

The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, until the landing of
Count Roger, the Norman, the great hero of mediaeval Sicily, who
recovered the island to the Christian faith. Taormina, true to its
tradition, was long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultory
warfare Count Roger sat down before it with determination. He surrounded
it with a circumvallation of twenty-two fortresses connected by ramparts
and bridges, and cut off all access by land or sea. Each day he
inspected the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, laid an
ambush for him in some young myrtles where the path he followed had a
very narrow pa