called La Favorita. The house is worth a visit for the sake of seeing what a half-crazy fancy will produce when united with royal wealth. King Ferdinand I., during his stay in Sicily early in this century, amused himself by building this country palace in the style of a Chinese villa, and adorned it with innumerable little bells, to be rung by every movement of the wind.

It was in the Favorita that the old king found himself cornered by Lord William Bentinck and his army during the British occupation of the island in 1812. It is said that his faithful subjects from Palermo encamped by thousands in the neighborhood—not, however, for the sake of defending their aged monarch, but to enjoy the fun of witnessing a fight in which both sides were hated by them with equal cordiality.

To an enterprising traveller some of the pleasantest hours of a long tour are those when, cutting loose from all guides and books, he wanders alone through the streets of an old city, enjoying with a sense of discovery the scraps of antiquity not described in any book which he is sure to meet with. Palermo and its neighborhood afford a most fertile field for such researches. The Saracenic villas of the suburbs and the early Norman buildings of the town will repay considerable patience spent in looking up the beauties to be found in the details of their construction. For instance, in the plain old church of S. Agostino there is a doorway and wheel window one sight of which is an ample reward for much wandering and searching.

MONREALE

On a morning too fresh and beautiful for staying in the city we rendered a vivacious cabman ecstatically happy by an engagement to drive us to Monreale. A brisk drive past the royal palace, out of the southern gate and five miles across the orange-covered plain brought us to the foot of an abrupt mountain. Not a half mile away, but far above, on the seemingly unapproachable heights, was perched the quaint village which was our destination: its ancient towering buildings glittered white and hot in the February sun under the canopy of cloudless blue. Ascending for half an hour on the well-constructed zigzag road, we stopped at the gate in the town-wall to buy the luscious-looking fruit of the cactus from a road-side vender, one of those ideal hags, apparently preserved by desiccation under the torrid sun, whom only Italy can produce in perfection. Then onward and upward we pushed through the village street—a street characteristic of these Southern walled villages, narrow, dark, festooned above with interminable lines of drying macaroni, covered below with abundant filth, and bordered by house-walls of enormous thickness, built for resisting heat. At every house-door or on the pavement in front sits the man of the house plying his trade, that all the world may know whether his goods are well made or ill. Up and down the street flow the lines of dark-eyed, swarthy people—women robed in rags, occasionally set off by a bit of striking color; children who in their astonishment become rigid at the sight of a foreigner; here and there an officer of the Italian army carefully picking his way through the mud; and everywhere produce-laden asses driven toward Palermo by the most picturesque of cut-throats, for without its ever-present force of soldiers Monreale would at once relapse into a hotbed of brigandage, as its recent history shows.

Almost at the summit of the town, facing a broad, paved square, stands the cathedral and its adjacent Benedictine monastery, both built upon the brink of the precipitous mountain, and both in external appearance severely plain, almost to shabbiness.

William II., king of Sicily, called the Good, founded on this Royal Mount a monastery for the Benedictine friars, and built it up with all the strength of a fortress and the magnificence of a palace. Little is left of that original building, which was finished in 1174, but in its few remains have fortunately been preserved the most splendid of cloisters. This scene of centuries of Benedictine meditations is a large quadrangle surrounded by an arcade of multitudinous small pointed arches resting upon pairs of slender white marble columns, like stalks of snow-white lilies in their grace and lightness. Some of the marble shafts are wrought with reliefs of flowers and trailing vines, while most of them were inlaid in bands or spirals of mosaic in gold and colors, now injured by age. The capitals which crown these shafts are exquisitely carved, and all mythology, the legends of the Church and the book of Nature have been ransacked to furnish subjects for the designs; so that out of two hundred or more no two are similar. All the decaying magnificence of the great building is pervaded by an oppressive silence, for it is one of the innumerable religious houses suppressed by the Italian government.

From the monastery to the cathedral is a walk of but a few steps. All disappointment at the external plainness is forgotten in approaching the chief entrance of the church. Michael Angelo said of Ghiberti's doors at Florence that "they were worthy to be the entrance to Paradise." They have rightly become famous through all the world, and yet these doors of Monreale leave on the mind of the beholder a strong impression of their beauty not less lasting than the Baptistery gates at Florence. In the execution of the biblical reliefs which completely encrust the massive leaves of bronze they must yield, of course, to the mature art of Ghiberti's later age; but the stately height of the solid metal doors, the alternate bands of mosaic and wrought-stone arabesques which flank them and surround over head the Arabian arch, and, above all, the sense that they conceal from view unparalleled splendors beyond, leave on the mind an impression which cannot be effaced.

Perhaps no other building deserves the epithet "splendid" so exactly as the cathedral of Monreale: the whole interior is radiant from the vast extent of its pictured walls. All the walls and vaulting of the nave and aisles, transepts and tribune, are overspread with ancient mosaics on a golden ground. It is natural to compare St. Mark's cathedral at Venice with this church, on account of its immense mosaic-covered surface: its sumptuous interior delights every beholder with the satisfying completeness which belongs to it; yet in all the Oriental splendor of the Venetian church nothing can equal in impressiveness a glance down the nave of Monreale. Wherever the eye turns it rests upon the glowing colors of some sacred picture—scenes from the Old Testament history, bright-robed figures of flying angels, haloed saints in the quaint Byzantine style, apostles and martyrs, patriarchs and prophets, and, high above them all, from a great picture in the vaulting of the apse, a startling face of Christ looking solemnly down through the length of the cathedral. Half the stiffness which characterizes these early mosaics seems to have been cast aside in treating this supreme subject. The colossal size of the figure, the hand raised in blessing the multitude, the sad but awful expression of the countenance, make it an all-pervading presence in the church. Amid all the glittering splendor of the building, while the gorgeous pomp of a holiday mass progressed and rippling strains of organ-music ran echoing through the arches, through all the bewildering brightness of the spectacle, the majesty of that Presence could not for a moment be forgotten, nor could the eyes avoid straying off from the glitter below to answer again and again to that solemn gaze above.