No such trouble has been taken to provide comely housing for the collection of antiquities which the town possesses.  The curator who led me through the museum (of course I was the sole visitor) lamented that it was only communal, the Italian Government not having yet cared to take it under control; he was an enthusiast, and spoke with feeling of the time and care he had spent upon these precious relics—­sedici anni di vita—­sixteen years of life, and, after all, who cared for them?  There was a little library of archaeological works, which contained two volumes only of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum; who, asked the curator sadly, would supply money to purchase the rest?  Place had been found on the walls for certain modern pictures of local interest.  One represented a pasture on the heights of Aspromonte, shepherds and their cattle amid rich herbage, under a summer sky, with purple summits enclosing them on every side; the other, also a Calabrian mountain scene, but sternly grand in the light of storm; a dark tarn, a rushing torrent, the lonely wilderness.  Naming the painter, my despondent companion shook his head, and sighed “Morto!  Morto!”

Ere I left, the visitors’ book was opened for my signature.  Some twenty pages only had been covered since the founding of the museum, and most of the names were German.  Fortunately, I glanced at the beginning, and there, on the first page, was written “Francois Lenormant, Membre de l’Institut de France”—­the date, 1882.  The small, delicate character was very suggestive of the man as I conceived him; to come upon his name thus unexpectedly gave me a thrill of pleasure; it was like being brought of a sudden into the very presence of him whose spirit had guided, instructed, borne me delightful company throughout my wanderings.  When I turned to the curator, and spoke of this discovery, sympathy at once lighted up his face.  Yes, yes!  He remembered the visit; he had the clearest recollection of Lenormant—­“un bravo giovane!” Thereupon, he directed my attention to a little slip of paper pasted into the inner cover of the book, on which were written in pencil a few Greek letters; they were from the hand of Lenormant himself, who had taken out his pencil to illustrate something he was saying about a Greek inscription in the museum.  Carefully had this scrap been preserved by the good curator; his piety touched and delighted me.

I could have desired no happier incident for the close of my journey; by lucky chance this visit to the museum had been postponed till the last morning, and, as I idled through the afternoon about the Via Plutino, my farewell mood was in full harmony with that in which I had landed from Naples upon the Calabrian shore.  So hard a thing to catch and to retain, the mood corresponding perfectly to an intellectual bias—­hard, at all events, for him who cannot shape his life as he will, and whom circumstance ever menaces with dreary harassment.  Alone and quiet, I heard the washing of the waves; I saw the evening fall on cloud-wreathed Etna, the twinkling lights come forth on Scylla and Charybdis; and, as I looked my last towards the Ionian Sea, I wished it were mine to wander endlessly amid the silence of the ancient world, to-day and all its sounds forgotten.