palms, oriental aloes, bananas, and pomegranates. Here, too, we were on St. Paul's track as he journeyed towards Rome as a prisoner. The Cathedral, of no great age, has on its facade the words: (Acts xxviii, 13) of the Latin version, ""De inde circumlegentes devenimus Rhegium"—"From thence we fetched a compass and came to Rhegium." St. Paul landed here, and the tradition of his preaching still survives. There is an amusing legend about it. Being out of doors, he was constantly interrupted by the chattering of the cicada locust. He bade them be silent. It is said that in this place only in Italy the cicada has been silent ever since.
Messina. At the Hotel Trinacria. A place of great antiquity; Greeks, Romans, Saracens, French, and Italians have successively held it. It has one of the finest harbours in the world, and does a large export trade of lemons, oranges, almonds, and fruit. Thence to Taormina, which has quite as old an history,—one of the most picturesque situations. A mass of broken, rolling hills rising sheer out of the sea, on the top of which is perched the town, approached by a zig-zag road absolutely impossible for cycles. Such a wealth of wild flowers; geranium, yellow Solanum apples, fennel, snapdragon, iris, cyclamen, arums, gentian and tall golden spurge. At the San Domenico Hotel we had bedrooms originally monastic cells, and over each door a wall painting of some old legend. Right on the top of a rocky eminence there is a perfect specimen of a Greek open-air theatre, with some Roman additions; its seats, cut out of stone, capable of accommodating forty thousand people, all within a short distance from the stage, 125 feet wide. Difficult to understand how the actors were heard, but
