A Morning at Sermione

“SIRMIO, brightest jewel of all forelands or islands that have been begotten in pellucid mere or in the illimitable ocean,” wrote Catullus two thousand years ago, “ how willing and how pleased am I to come home to you ! . . . Can there be a greater blessing than when the cords of care are snapped and the mind lets slip its burden, — when, spent with toil in far-off places, we come to our home sanctuary, and find rest on the long-dreamed-of couch ? . . . Welcome, lovely Sirmio ! Make merry before your master ! M&ke merry, too, ye waves of the water of Lydia! and let every jocund echo with which home is haunted break into laughing ! ”

The character of Catullus would not have stood out clearly without this note of feeling. In his precocious youth, and in his passionate relish for life and his ability to find in art a spontaneous expression for every heart-beat, he reminds us of Keats, Byron, and Musset, all spendthrifts of emotion, who summed up the meaning of half a dozen existences to fling it away before their early deaths. “ Catulle,” wrote Pezay, his French translator, “ mourut jeune et avait Yet as the lover of Lesbia and the enamored victim of her coquetries and perfidies, or as the man of letters and of high fashion, he could hardly have kindled in us moderns the reciprocal feeling which is roused by this touch of homesick feeling for his summer retreat on Lake Benacus (our Lago di Garda), by his susceptibility to the inspiration of out-of-door life, and by his loving interpretative sympathy for all the familiar aspects of the spot, as recognizable now as then, — the lapping of the waters on the shore, the echoes which endlessly repeat the music, the charm of the freshening gale, the splendor of the crimsoning day.

Without these associations, Garda, bluest of lakes, would still be one of the loveliest; but there is a distinct charm in recognizing the very spirit and essence of the local color which delighted Catullus twenty centuries ago. We had come from Venice to Verona, and from Verona to the Lago di Garda, to spend a day at Sermione. We had reached the Hotel Royal at Desenzano just in time for a seven o’clock table d’hôte dinner, of which we were the sole partakers. A thunderstorm had overtaken us at Verona, and shower after shower had chased each other across the landscape, as we left that city behind us and pursued our journey. But when, after dinner, we walked forth from the dining-room to the stone terrace which bordered the lake, the sky had cleared, except towards the north, where, above Mounts Tragna, Baldo, and Tremalgo, heavy clouds were piled, — some dark purple, others snowy white, but all at this moment flushed with crimson and amber. It was hard to define which was mountain and which cloud, but massed together they made a magnificent background for the lake, where the storm-wind still worked, lashing high billows into breakers, twisting and tearing their crests into strange shapes, and hurling them against the piers with a force which broke them into showers of spray. Half a dozen fishermen and lads were bailing out the boats and drawing them up on the beach, talking and gesticulating, while they watched with curiosity, and perhaps anxiety, the movements of three or four sloops, their red and yellow sails reefed, which veered and tacked, and tacked and veered, seeming powerless to make headway against the boisterous sea. That no lake is so gusty or so dangerous for navigation as Garda has been known since Vergil’s time, when he described

“ Benacus where the insurgent billow makes A noise like ocean’s own.”

Stretching as it does for thirty-five miles from southwest to northeast, the narrow upper half of the deep basin being inclosed by precipitous mountains, while the lower part spreads wide with comparatively flat and open shores, it is a favorite track of storms, which, once gathered in, are pent up as in a funnel, and rage and fume long after the force of the tempest is spent elsewhere.

Sometimes a passing effect of light invests a scene with wild, weird possibilities which remain a part of our imaginative memory. The stormy grandeur of this first impression of Garda was merged in one of perfect beauty when we awoke next morning and saw the sun flooding the lake with gold and the terraces with every joyous color. Yet no disenchantment destroyed my illusion of the Alpine magnificence of the scenery; for although everywhere else the skies were blue and the water and shores inwoven with golden light, above the mountains at the north still hung the purple clouds crested with white domes and spires, tempting one to believe that snow-peaks and dazzling glaciers lend sublimity to Garda.

It is not only pleasantest, but safest, where the Italian lakes are concerned, to love much and many ; or, if one confesses to any preference, to declare that the one last seen and best recalled is the most exquisite; for, by comparing and criticising and confessing ourselves partisans, we run the risk of missing the special charm of one which serves to complete the chromatic scale of beauty which makes the Italian lakes peerless.

If I were myself to be a lake, I fancy I should choose to be Varese: nothing wonderful in myself, but for the blessedness of mirroring the lovely pastoral foregrounds which rise above its shores into the undulating hills with the bloom of a fruit decking their distances, — that nameless liquid color between lapis lazuli and amethyst; dotted here and there by farmhouses, by the white walls of convents and red-roofed campanile towers where soft silvery bells are forever sounding ; then, higher still, like a magical vision in mid-air, the great peaks and domes of the huge Alpine rampart showing from Monte Viso to Monte Leone, with Monte Rosa’s four sharp peaks dominating the chain ; then, above all, the vast crystal sky.

For sheer ideal loveliness and perfection, there is, of course, nothing like the Lake of Como at Bellagio, where, look in what direction one may, the view fills, enchants, and trampiilizes eye, mind, and soul. Then Maggiore, with its splendid amplitude, its dazzling vistas of great snow-peaks, its islands, each a fairy-tale, its purple shores with their bewildering lights and solemn shadows, — for grandeur there is nothing like Maggiore.

But on that July day Garda was sufficiently lovely to make one’s heart swell with a sense of the consummation of the ideal.

It was not enough for the waters to be blue ; they ran through the entire scale of blue tones, from palest azure to lapis lazuli and indigo. A soft, almost imperceptible swell, only just enough to give an endless effect of shimmer and glancing light, stirred the surface of the lake. We took an early breakfast in the loggia outside our rooms, part of it beneath a trellis where great bunches of grapes just beginning to swell burned like globules of green light, as the sun shone through them. At our right rose tall oleanders from the court beneath, their sprays of rosy blossoms thrown into relief against the blue of the sky and the blue of the lake. At our left was a thicket of pomegranates with their gemlike flowers, and orange and lemon trees, their deep verdure lighted up by globes of pale yellow and starry blooms, all alike threaded with the intensely brilliant sunlight. To cavil over bitter coffee and poor butter in such a spot would have been to forget a divine birthright for a mess of pottage. One has often enough drunk excellent coffee in a stuffy room where not a prospect pleased.

We might have crossed the lake in a boat to the promontory of Sermione, but at intervals a mutter of thunder came from the mountains at the north, and, remembering the stormy Benacus of the preceding day, we decided to go by carriage instead. A leisurely drive round the lake had its own attractions, since, besides glimpses of Garda, it would give a closer view of the fields. Italian agriculture had, I will confess, aroused an inextinguishable curiosity in me. No sooner had I crossed the Alps than the difference of method, besides the difference of climate, startled my attention, piqued my curiosity, and charmed me with its picturesqueness. No longer did the landscape, as in France, bring up at every turn pictures by Corot, Millet, Rousseau, and Daubigny. Yet never, it seemed to me, was any landscape so distinctly human as that of northern Italy. Yergil tells of the necessity laid upon mortals that man, by pondering, might divine the mysteries of creation, and in due time conceive the varying arts whereby we have leave to live. Without having read the Georgics, any observer sees that Nature here has been incessantly watched, coaxed; her every mood divined and pressed into service; her utmost ruggedness humored until it becomes generous concession. The beguiling of the streamlets, in their flowing, into garden-beds; the pollarding and the grafting of all trees; the clipping of the poplars for the twigs which furnish the peasant’s fuel; the cherishing the life of the willows, so useful for making baskets, and for tying vines to boughs and fruit-trees to espaliers; the forcing of mulberry-trees to pay a double debt, furnishing the support of the vines and giving their leaves to the ravenous silkworms,— all these are evidences of the deft economies of a people habituated by long instinct and tradition to the most careful prevision.

Italian agriculture may be very unscientific, but all the same it is agriculture rehned and idealized upon, and an American can only feel that it is charming, and that by comparison our own methods are wasteful, ugly, and unsympathetic. European peasants, with their old-fashioned ways and crude inventions, keep much closer to the great mother than can we, with our costly labor-saving appliances. We are magnificently large in our ideas, disdainful of persevering efforts for small returns, and. measuring Italian corn by our own bushel, their results may seem meagre; but there is an attractiveness about some of these peasants which belongs to careful workers, and to careful workers alone; and their patient methods give their labor a value in itself, and help to elevate them and their speech and their dress into that mysterious grace and attractiveness of human expression which we call picturesque and artistic quality almost without knowing why.

The Italian peasant’s golden age is behind, and not before; he would be well content to go on doing as his father and grandfather did before him. He may be a hired laborer working by the season ; he may share with the proprietor the produce of the land, or he may himself be the proprietor. But whether proprietor or coöperator, the peasant is certain to give his whole time and thought to the land he works on ; not only his own strength, but that of his wife, of his old father and mother, of his children of every age, from the eldest down to the least toddler. There are such diverse and incessant calls for patient activities : stones must be picked up and piled in heaps ; twigs and reeds gathered, packed, and bound; fruit trees tied to espaliers ; vines watched and trained, the exuberant, foliage delicately thinned by tender hands until at last “ the dresser sings in the perfect rows.”The vineyards and orchards on the terraces of some “ sheer cliff side thronged by the dwellings of men ” are often a study. Wherever a shelving rock can hold a handful of earth, no precipice is too steep to lose its chance of giving root to the vine or the fig or the olive; or if the soil prove too scanty to sustain such vigorous growth, there is still opportunity to plant the wheat that provides the straw which, during the winter, is woven by women and children into hats, baskets, and fans.

But what perhaps most quickly seizes the imagination is the silk culture.

For we remember Miss Preston’s charming translation of Mistral’s story of Mirèio’s leaf-picking along with Vincen, as we see the women, girls, and boys in the mulberry-trees filling great brown canvas bags. These “ magnarello ” must lead a lively life for the thirty-five days before the silkworms prepare for their final sleep.

Towards the middle of July, the steamers which ply on the lakes take on at each landing tall cylindrical baskets, tapering slightly from top to bottom, filled with the soft grayish, yellowish cocoons. These are carried to the centres of the silk industries, then returned empty for fresh supplies.

Yes, the peasant of northern Italy knows little of that dolce far niente which we associate with the land of the olive and the vine, He is a hard worker, and incessant toil in the open air ages the women prematurely ; that is, wrinkles, withers, and fades them outwardly. I fancy the spirit is not so soon quenched. At Locarno I had an instance of this. I happened to be loitering outside a shop while my companions were making some purchases inside, and, to pass the time, I turned over a pile of sandals and clogs exposed for sale in a basket on the step. I had seen women and girls wearing these zoccoli with wooden soles and heels, with a scanty upper consisting generally of a gayly flowered chintz merely covering the toes, thus holding on the shoe most uncomfortably to my eyes. While I held a pair in my hand, a woman at least seventy, to judge by her looks, her dark skin withered like a dead leaf, issued from the place, and stopped with frank and friendly curiosity to look at me. Pleased as I naturally was by such a mark of attention, I endeavored to explain to her by gestures (for my scanty knowledge of the language did not meet the requirements of the case) my sense of the unsuitability and discomfort of such foot-gear. I intimated that the clogs were heavy, and, being fastened to the foot only at the toes, the heel flopped loosely at every step. She caught my meaning as by divination. She extended her own foot, set off by a gay sandal, and put it down with a smart clatter of the heel on the stone step, evidently a respectable, affluent, perhaps musical sound to her ears: she danced about to show the ease and lightness of movement induced by the shoes; she caught one off her foot to suggest with what deftness it might punish an offender ; she cracked invisible nuts with it, hammered imaginary nails ; she replaced it on her foot and waded through possible puddles of water ; in fact came victoriously out of the wordless controversy, and, pointing to my own high, tightly - buttoned - up and immovable boots, gave a decisive shake of the head, having proved conclusively that they were a feeble, useless, and clumsy contrivance in comparison with her clogs. Indeed, I am inclined to doubt whether European peasants are often consumed by envy of any of the appurtenances or distinctive personal traits of the travelers and tourists whose invasion they accept with some quizzical curiosity and much ironical observation. A generous Providence has decreed that the foresfieri should be bitten by the gadfly of unrest, and, tormented by a desire for escape, run up and down the gracious earth ; staring at what is time-worn and immemorial as if it were a brand-new novelty ; discussing the obvious ; putting questions about simple every-day things which even a bambino is born with a clear knowledge of ; making the drollest mistakes in the language, which, were it not for manners, would double any sensible man or woman up with laughter; and all the time flinging about lire and soldi as if they burned in our pockets, for which saving grace of circumstance the saints he thanked, since it makes bearable the stupidities we commit.

This gossiping digression belongs to the road to Sermione, where everything, from a peasant to a pergola, of vines, takes the eye. Yesterday’s showers have brought forth thousands of fresh blossoms out of the very dust of the wayside, from each crevice and cranny of wall and pavement, new to unfamiliar eyes and of an exotic prettiness. At our right the cornfields and vineyards glitter with fresh brilliancy of color; the vines have grown riotous, and not only fall in festoons, but take possession of the whole tree which offers its support ; the gray-green olives ripple into silver as the wind stirs them, and the acacias and poplars shimmer and shiver, while here and there a cypress, black as night, tapers up into the air, immovable except for a sort of rhythmical vibration. On our left is the heavenly blue lake, with its villages, its fertile shores, its rocky promontories, hills, precipices, and high mountains, over which fleecy clouds keep guard. Our driver tells us that the lake is fed by springs, some hot and others cold. He points to a place where the water eddies and ripples, showing an incessant disturbance below the surface. He explains that the depth of the lake varies very much according to the season, and that the melting of the snows in spring causes great freshets. He goes on to say that Garda has always been famous for its excellent fish : pilchards, carpione, trout, eels, pike, barbel, tench, and carp. Some of the carpione (salmon trout) are of enormous size and excellent flavor, and have from time immemorial been the delight of epicures. There are traditional recipes for cooking all these fish of the lake, and who knows hut that they were handed down from the feasts given by Catullus at Sermione or on board of his yacht? The huge eels of Garda, for example, should be roasted before a bed of live coals, and at every turn sprinkled with a dressing of crumbs and spices, basted with their own fat, and finally deliciously encrusted with this rich dressing. As for pilchards, they are to be thrown on the fire while yet alive, to be skinned and dressed after a leisurely roasting, then eaten simply with the unsurpassed olive oil of Sermione, salt, and pepper.

Americans, accustomed to our own easily exhausted lakes and rivers, find occasion for surprise and admiration when they see the waters of Europe everywhere teeming with choice fish. We have to confess that these effete peoples seem in some occult way not only themselves to have understood for many generations the art of living, but of making possible the lives of those who come after them. They possess the knack both of eating their cake and having it.

The isthmus which connects Sermione with the mainland is so low and so narrow that one readily accepts the statement that the promontory often becomes an island when the waters of the lake rise. This slight neck of land offers a good opportunity for fortifications, and the Scaligers, who for the better part of two centuries were powerful princes of Verona, built the castle under whose portcullis we now pass. The coat-ofarms of the Scaligers, which we have so lately seen on the tombs of the family at Verona, adorns the walls. It was in this castle that Julius Cæsar Scaliger, one of the greatest humanists and authors of the sixteenth century, was born. It is interesting to note the fact that Catullus, a Veronese, had a villa at Sermione, and that twelve centuries later the princes of Verona and their descendants found the same promontory a favorite retreat. But we clatter into the village, indifferent to the towers and battlements of mediæval times, which seem too modern for such a classical neighborhood. It is roughly paved, like all Italian villages, and we are glad to leave the carriage and pursue our way on foot.

For this is Sermione, the Sirmio of Catullus, that eye of heaven, that brightest jewel of all promontories or islands, as he loved to call it. Too often, in exploring antiquities, we have been jostled by the modern, but the unique charm of Sermione lies in the absolute solitariness of the place. Along with the little fishing-village which we leave behind us drops away almost every reminder of the busy, pushing world. Gardens and orchards cover the promontory, but the sight of growing maize and wheat and fruit and vine does not separate us from Nature, only familiarizes her aspect.

There is no sound but that of birds, and of the thousands of cicadas that take voice together in the olive groves we are traversing, — a sound so multitudinous and so continuous that it soon gains rhythm, and half pleases and contents the ear. Still, through the din of it we are conscious of the wash of the waves on the rocks below. We have a guide who points out to us a building which he calls the Baths of Catullus, and a troop of boys follow and waylay us, anxious to light up the subterranean grottoes for our edification. But after a time these well-meant efforts are spent; we are left to take our sight-seeing in our own way, and we emerge from the orchard upon what seems a bold bluff rising high above the water, to find the silence and solitude unspoiled. The blue lake is spread out before us, with the bulwark of cloud-crested mountains for a background. Planted under and against sheer cliffs, here and there along the bold shores nestle villages. Between the rocky headlands are stretches of rich country rising in gentle undulations to the purple hills. The color of the lake, the graceful sweep of the coast with its far reaches basking in the hazy shimmering light, the mountains and the gorgeous cloud-pageant which transfigures them, are at first quite enough to satisfy us, and we hardly think of the ruins we have come to see. The sound of the lapping waves as they “ break into laughing” comes up with sweet persistence, as they wash incessantly the shelving rocks whose whiteness is visible for a long distance into the lake under the transparent waters.

The view is so magically lovely, and so varied by its coloring of incomparable breadth and depth, that it is only after a time that we discover that the headland we have gained is in fact the roof of the ruins ; that it is formed by a gradual accretion of débris above the walls, arches, columns, and towers of once stately edifices. The audacity of nature fairly startles us, when we see that by the slow processes of these twenty centuries, storms, floods, perhaps earthquakes, the growth and decay of vegetation, these monuments of antiquity have almost been absorbed into the bosom of Mother Earth herself. The lofty walls, six hundred feet long, which support this end of the promontory supplement the original rocks and cliffs which belong to it, and now it is no easy task to tell where nature ends and art begins.

Between the toppling elevation where we are sitting and the shore are beautiful detached columns and arches, overrun by rich ivy, and crested with nodding grasses, scarlet poppies, and bright pinks which teasing, plundering black bees are searching flower by flower. Lizards dart and rustle. We descend to the water’s edge by a precipitous path, and survey the ruins from the level of their foundations. Looked at from this point, the scene not only delights by its loveliness, but touches by its desolation ; and it troubles the intellect as well, for it rouses more questions than any earthly being can answer.

It seems incredible that so little should he definitely known of architectural remains so striking. Yet it may be argued that the exact site of Pliny’s country house on the Lago di Como can hardly be said to be determined ; and if his letters, which, with graceful pedantry, keep alive so many details of his private life, have not preserved such a landmark, how little could we reasonably expect to find any authentic revelation concerning the summer retreat of Catullus ! For the poems of Catullus were wholly lost sight of for a whole era, and were only rediscovered in the fourteenth century by a notary of Verona, — rediscovered, indeed, only to be once more lost for a period. Local traditions, handed down from father to son, that Catullus owned a house on the Lago di Garda we could scarcely count on. The poems alone give the clue to the fact that he built a villa on the promontory of Sirmio on the Lake of Benacus, that here he loved to come, and that here some of the friends who followed him from Verona and from Rome also built villas. Here he brought, by way of the Po and Mincio, his yacht or pinnace, old and shattered, but still dear from its tried usefulness and fleetness in the Adriatic, Propontis, and Euxine, and dedicated to Castor and Pollux, who had led the Argonauts and carried them through the raging tempest, hence were made the deities propitious to navigators.

This Catullus himself has told us, and this is all we know. Of course not a few historians and archæologists have investigated the subject. Scipio Maffei, of Verona, who in 1731 published his Verona Illustrata, believes the whole peninsula of Sermione to have belonged to Catullus, and that his residence was situated at the extremity nearest the lake. This is naturally a conclusion dear to the tourist, who, if obliged to admit that history is nothing but a fable agreed on, prefers that authorities should in no wise conflict, but decide with absolute finality that these ivy-clad arches supported the open loggia of the house of the poet of the republic.

After the siege of Peschiera in I79fi, Lacombe Saint-Michel, a general of the French Directory, and himself clearly an ardent admirer of Catullus, surveyed the site of these ruins, and traced to his own satisfaction and that of others the entire ground plan, settling every knotty question. Under the stimulus of these associations General Saint-Michel gave a brilliant fète here, and, inviting Anelli, a local poet, host and guest in turn recited their own poems written in praise of the ancient owner of the site. Toasts were interspersed, wine flowed freely, — good Falernian, we trust, —and the enthusiasm rose to such a generous tide of emotion that, when the inhabitants of Sermione happened to arrive with a petition that the French troops quartered upon them should be removed, the general instantly granted the request. Napoleon Bonaparte himself, when on his way to negotiate the treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, turned from his road between Peschiera and Brescia to visit the ruins. These facts are related by Noël, a French writer of the beginning of this century, who gives the plan of the villa of Catullus as sketched by Lacombe Saint-Michel, proving the building to have been large and magnificent, of which statement, indeed, the arches and pilasters leave no reasonable doubt. He argues from these signs of opulence that Catullus must have been possessed of ample means. That he lived as rich men live is clear. A native of Verona, he seems always to have had a house at his disposal there. He was handsomely established in Rome, and owned besides a farm on the confines of the Sabine and Tiburtine territory, to which he frequently retired to recruit after the over-profuse dinners of the capital. It is evident, also, that his means, whatever they may have been, were strained to their utmost. He records his fruitless expedition to Bithynia, in the train of the prætor Memmius, where he hoped and expected to have filled his purse with something better than “cobwebs.” There is more than once an allusion in his verses to the scanty rations which, in the present state of his finances, were all he could give his friends. And he frankly recounts how once, when he boasted to the consul Varus and his mistress of the magnificence he maintained in the provinces, the lady slyly begged the good services of some of the half dozen straight-backed fellows he had described, and he was obliged to confess that not a retainer had he at home or abroad.

No doubt he squandered a handsome patrimony recklessly, and was often, like the men he knew familiarly,—gay spendthrifts and prodigal poets like himself, — out of pocket; yet all his poems bear witness to his freedom from sordid ambitions and unsatisfied cravings for advancement, and he has always a laugh for his most pressing anxieties. He was no politician, but had a disinterested love for the republic, then beginning to feel the storm and stress of its final days. He was jealous of Cæsar’s encroachments, and had a hearty hatred of Cæsar’s minions who fattened on the plunder of every land they conquered.

Everywhere Catullus shows the clearsightedness, the ease of procedure, the independence of a man of ample means who is shut out from no place he cares to enter. But whether he could ever have been possessed of the wealth requisite for building so splendid a villa as the stupendous ruins at Sermione suggest is a question that moderns cannot decide. The Rev. John Chetwode Eustace, who visited the Lago di Garda in 1801, and in 1813 gave to the world his monumental Classical Tour in Italy, a book which has never in its way been surpassed either for learning or for charm, has a passage concerning Sermione which I will quote :

“ The extremity of this promontory is covered with arched ways, towers, and subterranean passages supposed by the inhabitants to be Roman, but bearing, in fact, a strong resemblance to Gothic ruins.” Yet whatever the ruins may be, he proceeds to show, Catullus undoubtedly at one period occupied this very Spot, and preferred it to any other region. “He could not,” Eustace continues, “ have chosen a more delightful retreat. In the centre of a magnificent lake, surrounded with scenery of the greatest variety and majesty, apparently secluded from the world, yet beholding from his garden the villas of his Veronese friends, he might have enjoyed alternately the pleasures of retirement and society, and daily, without the sacrifice of his connections, which Horace¹ seems inclined to make in a moment of despondency, beheld the grandeur and agitation of the ocean without its terrors and immensity. . . . In short, more convenience and more beauty were seldom united; and such a peninsula is, as Catullus enthusiastically observes, scarcely to be matched in all the wide range of the world of waters.”

That Catullus ouee lived here,— that is the essence of the thing; and that, in spite of the blight upon his life, he could still come, unspoiled in heart and mind, to enjoy the sound of the swirling waves that lapped unceasingly on the shore, the whisper of the myrtle branches, blossom-laden, and sweet sleep on his “ long-dreamed-of couch " at Sermione, is a triumph for human nature which one likes to believe is able to keep itself wholesome in spite of the corruptions of the worst age. He has immortalized himself by recording with an absolute simplicity of truth everything about his own life, and all he met, saw, and felt. That he told of his love for Sirmio in the same direct, spontaneous way with which he described his feeling for Lesbia makes the promontory and the lake his own down to the very heart of them. And the visitor to the spot to-day finds every point of view so pure, so untouched, so admirably lovely, that the place will forever be remembered as an absolutely fresh and unspoiled event in one’s experience.

Perhaps after a time, when Rome has been excavated to the last fragment, the ruins of Sermione will be laid bare; the flowers and the grasses and the ivies which now nod over the arches will be torn away ; the lizard will no longer be permitted to

the grottoes now opening in front to the water and in the rear into galleries and labyrinths, and the arches which once supported the great friezes and pediments, will all be dug out, scraped, and left hideously bare for twentieth-century research. Perhaps then a coin will be found, a medal, or an urn which will throw light on a forgotten period.

But the fin de siècle pilgrim may be thankful that so far, at least, Sermione remains unspoiled, not only by the archæologist, but by the swarm of tourists who create a demand for hotels, pensions, tramways,funiculaires, excursionboats, and steam-whistles. The spirit of its beauty and of its solitude must revisit with unspeakable refreshment the memory of those who have once seen the blue waters, the cloud-crested mountains, the far sweep of lovely coasts, and the crimson and yellow lateen sails of the boats that leave an azure, arrowlike track across the lake.

Ellen Olney Kirk.