The Cruise of the Branwen

THE CRUISE OF THE BRANWEN he thoroughly agreed. " If the King had not done this I should have banished him myself." The full facts did not come out for some time afterwards. But the truth is that as the priest was standing on the altar steps above his kneeling congregation, he looked up and saw a thin drift of white dust and mortar trickling from a crack in the wall close to the roof. Terror seems to have paralysed his natural instincts, for he rushed off without a word of warning through a small door at the east end to his own house, and left his congregation to their fate. Very few out of more than two hundred were brought out alive. Fortunately this is a very rare exception to the courage and self-sacrifice usually evinced by men of his race and creed. I shall not take up space in this brief record with descriptions of what every traveller has seen and every lover of Italy has read. Both at Rome and Naples we walked in the Sacred Ways, we visited the ternples ; we trod-some of us for the first time-the soil that had hitherto been only the shadowy background to classical authors who had suddenly become living personalities, for we moved among the visible dwelling places of the heroes of their verse and prose, we experienced that thrill of amazed recognition, that vague stirring of memories so deep they seem almost ancestral, which is the guerdon of every visitor to ancient Italy at the sight of things and places hallowed by immemorial association. To me a recent acquaintance with that fascinating writer, Victor Berard, had given a 36