aguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of
many tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost
Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves,
Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange African dialects, Norman and
Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp
battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, the
death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on the
hard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercer
pain--century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe. My
fancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly lifted, castle-rock the
triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman in the
age-long duel, and as these fade, the springing brands of Byzantine,
Arab, and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of France, Spain, and
Sicily; and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone
hill-wide. "Oh, wherefore?" I whisper; and all is silent save the surge
still lifting round the coast the far voices of the old Ionian sea. I
have wondered that the children of Etna should dwell in its lovely
paradise, as I thought how often, how terribly, the lava has poured
forth upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black horror of volcanic
eruption overwhelmed the land. Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that
Etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, the agonies of her
burnings, the terrors of her living entombments, all her manifold deaths
at once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that has flowed
on this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here
suffered at the hands of man. O Etna, it is not thou that man should
fear! He should fear his brother-man.

IX

The stars were paling over Etna, white and ghostly, as I came out to
depart. In the dark street I met a woman with a young boy clinging to
her side. Her black hair fell down over her shoulders, and her bosom was
scantily clothed by the poor garment that fell to her ankles and her
feet. She was still young, and from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine
with that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; the
child, half naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother's hand. What
brought her there at that hour, alone with her child? She seemed the
epitome of the human life I was leaving behind, come forth to bid
farewell; and she passed on under the shadows of the dawn. The la