prisoners of Procopius, whom he had exhorted to constancy with his last breath, were then despatched, their remains thrown in a pile on those of the martyred bishop, and the whole set fire to," that men might know," as Ibrahim said, "the fate in store for those who dared to resist him." Sicily being now at his mercy, he crossed to the mainland, where Abdallah's victories had already broken the power of Byzantium, and, marching unopposed through Calabria, reached Cosenza, which he prepared to besiege in due form. In addition to the Byzantine theme of Longobardia, corresponding to the Calabrias and Basilicata, south Italy was then divided into six hostile states: the Longobard principalities of Benevento, Capua, and Salerno, the republics of Naples, Amalfi, and Gaeta. All were equally terrified at the approach of the formidable Brachimo, and the neighboring towns despatched envoys to his camp to make their submission and beg for terms of peace. He sent them back with the haughty answer, "that Italy was his own, and he would deal with the inhabitants according to his pleasure; that the Greek and Frankish petty tyrants might equally despair of resisting his power; that the city of the old man Peter might first expect his onset, and that then would come the hour of Constantinople." The tery which still bears his name. Yet simultanously with that portent in the skies, Azrael, the smiter of the strong, had entered the Mussulman camp; the siege of Cosenza languished, for the tyrant whose fierce purpose and adamantine will alone welded together the discordant elements of his unwieldy host, was stricken with mortal disease, and the fermenting hates and jealousies of his followers were only waiting for his last breath to break into open dissension. The actual manner of his death is variously told by Italian legend, some versions ascribing it to an apparition of St. Peter, some to the prayers of Sant' Elia, and others to the direct vengeance of Heaven itself in the shape of a thunderbolt. On receipt of this menace the cities began to provision and fortify in haste, while the inhabitants of the rural districts flocked into them for refuge. The magnates of Naples, sitting in council under the presidency of Stephen, the bishop, and Gregory, the consul, decided to raze to the ground the Lucullan castle on Cape Misenum; "the villa first built by Marius, then bought and beautified by Lucullus; the scene of domestic crime and His worthless grandson, Ziadet-Allah, unblushing depravity in the hands of the had no control over the mutinous host, earlier Cæsars, and of the inglorious exile whom he led back to Sicily without deof the last of their line (Augustulus lived lay, transporting thither also the remains there as the pensioner of Odoacer, A.D. of the deceased tyrant. Authorities are 479); transformed in 496 into a monastery divided as to their final resting-place, and and monument to San Severino; and in none knows to-day which continent is pol846 into a fortress occupied by the Mus-luted by their touch. His tyranny of sulmans of Sicily; its walls were a chrono- twenty-seven years had been followed by logical table of the revolutions of Italian society during nine centuries." * For five days the Neapolitans labored at the destruction of this monument of antiquity, and brought thence the relics of the saint in solemn procession to Naples, where they were deposited in the monas but seven months of penance, when his death, at fifty-three years of age, so unexpectedly cut short the career of conquest on which, to all human forecast, he seemed but entering; liberating Italy from the greatest danger to which she has been exposed during our era, and averting from her forever the threatened ruin of permanent African dominion. It is indeed true that for yet a century Calabria to be inherited from other ancestors than those of the more sedate and lighter-complexioned Roman or Tuscan, while a more intimate knowledge of the people only brings to light a still greater difference in their morals and modes of thought. and a half desultory eddies of Mussulman | feature and costume - where a dialect of invasion ebbed and flowed over her south- Greek lingers still among the mountains of ern provinces; but the maritime republics Calabria, and a dialect of Arabic is the were already gathering strength to stem common language of Sicily must always their progress, even before the fair-haired be a problem to Anglo-Saxons, whose northern warriors appeared upon the mother country has blent so many discordscene, like demigods among the races of ant elements into one homogeneous whole. fallen humanity, to hurl back forever the The most superficial observer, however, dark tide that had so long threatened the cannot but conjecture the terracotta-tinted shores of Europe. The new champions | skin, the lizard-like rapidity of glance and of the cross, come of a race fresh from gesture, and the mobile irregularity of Scandinavian fiords and forests, and but | feature common to the natives of Sicily and recently converted to Christianity from the worship of Thor and Odin, brought the vigorous vitality of their northern blood, and the first fervor of a purer faith, to overthrow by the mere impact of their touch the hectic civilization of the East and the spent fury of Mahometan fanaticism. The record of their conquest reads more like an heroic poem than a sober page of history, and we should doubt the veracity of its chroniclers were not the bare outline of its manifest results as wonderful as any of its romantic episodes. A little band of warriors cast away upon a foreign | shore, who become within a few years one of the leading powers of Europe, sought as allies by both empires, courted by princes and pontiffs, and dreaded by the followers of the prophet from the Atlantic to the Ægean their story is surely as wonderful as that of any paladins of romance. But while they overthrew Mussulman rule in tho Two Sicilies, they could not so easily obliterate the traces of Mussulman colonization. The manners and morals of the conquerors were first modified by its influence; those of the ruling family so notoriously so, that the descendants of the pious house of Hauteville were renegades in all but name, and the second Roger and the second Frederick kept court at Palermo more in the style of Eastern sultans than of Christian princes. Mere local corruption of manners, however, introduced by a luxurious court, passed away with the foreign dynasty; while the effect of a strong infusion of African blood among all classes of the native population is still perceptible after the lapse of six centuries; and no one can estimate the difficulties of the present Italian government in ruling its southern provinces who does not take into account the survival of the Saracen element among their inhabitants. This persistence of race in Italy, where the boundary of a commune sometimes has been for centuries a line of demarcation between two hostile states, and a few miles of water channel still form an impassable barrier to hereditary traits of The condition of Sicily is notorious; but while Liberals and reactionaries dispute over the share of their respective parties in causing it, they do not care to trace its origin further back, and connect it with the history of the remote past. Yet it is a striking fact that the ancient geographical distribution of Saracens and Sicilians still influences the comparative degree of public safety in the island, and that tracing on a map the territory where violence and anarchy at present reign supreme, we accurately define the zone where Christianity was almost extirpated under the rule of the Moslem, where Mahometanism triumphant struck its roots deepest, and persecuted, found its last refuge in the land. It is at least a coincidence that the country round Palermo, Girgenti, and Trapani, known to-day as the disturbed provinces, was described in the thirteenth century as the Saracen march. There in the wild borderland, where the war of race was fought to the bitter end, the dim tradition of violence still survives under other forms, and adapts itself to altered circumstances. There the Mahometan settlers, again and again expelled from their homesteads, harassed and plundered the new occupants from their retreats in the mountains; and there the modern brigands, lording it over the land as if they felt themselves its lawful proprietors, still levy fine and blackmail as the ransom of its possession by others. There the Saracens, driven from their capital by religious persecution, organized themselves in the wilderness as bands of outlaws, resuming their hereditary classification as Arab tribes; and there, in Palermo and its district, the names of those very tribes, imported by the aristocracy of the desert from the Land of Yemen, survive in the nomenclature of the criminal associations to this day. These fugitives, finally starved into submission and deported by Frederick the Second, formed the great military settlement of Lucera in Apulia, and colonized great part of the Calabrias, where the conquerors of Sicily, exiled by the grandson of Barbarossa, have left their wild blood and long inheritance of wrong to filter through many a generation and break out in many a form of crime. ment of the Garigliano- the plague spot of central Italy has transmitted its inheritance of violence to Fondi and Itri, the robbers' nests of the Neapolitan frontier. Round the former of these roved Marco Sciarra, the courteous bandit of the sixteenth century, immortalized by his message to Tasso, while the latter is distinguished as the birthplace of the still more famous hero, Michele Pezza, known to opera-goers as Fra Diavolo. Bovino, on the edge of the great table-land of Apulia, enjoys the reputation of being the greatest brigand nursery in that part of Italy, and a glance at the map shows its proximity to Lucera, where Frederick the Second established his swarthy chivalry in 1239. So tender was he of their religious susceptibili ties, that Christian worship was prohibited within the walls of the Saracen sanctuary, and the fierce warriors, when expelled from their stronghold thirty years later, must have carried with them to the neighboring mountains a bitter sense of wrong, and undying enmity to civil order. A band of turbaned marauders occupied at Agropoli, in the mountains of Pæstum, the very haunts of the brigands who still hold at their discretion the province of Salerno, while the whole population of Calabria, which, from the deportation of exiles across the straits became assimilated to that of Sicily under the Normans, may for irreclaimable violence and savagery be classed with that of Sicily to-day. Amari's description of the depredations systematically committed by the despoiled and outlawed Palermitans in the thirteenth century, might almost pass for an extract from the Italian papers in our own day; and the capture by the Saracens in 1221 of Orso, Bishop of Girgenti, who ransomed himself for a large sum of money, after fourteen months' captivity, differs little from the case of the English banker kidnapped by Leone's band in the autumn of 1876. Nay, to go even further back, we might, with little alteration, make the account given by Ibu-Haukal, an Arabian traveller, of the ribât of Palermo in 972, serve to describe the haunts of the Mafia of Palermo in 1877. The ribât were barracks for volunteers, who, kept in the frontier towns at the public expense in readiness to repel invasion, formed a sort of Mahometan militia; and degenerating with the degeneracy of Islam, became a public evil instead of a public safeguard. Retaining nothing of the zealot save his disregard of human life, and nothing of the soldier save his contempt for all peaceful avocations, every form of depravity and crime found in them instruments ready made to its hand. The swaggering cutthroats who lord it in the streets of the Sicilian capital to the present hour, disdaining every trade save that of violence and bloodshed, have faithfully preserved the characteristics of their Saracen proto-ilization throughout Africa; and the same types. In Sicily, however, a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances might possibly have caused a single though startling coincidence; that between the boundary line separating conquerors and conquered six centuries ago, and the frontier of order dividing comparative tranquillity from open violence to-day. But on the Italian mainland, where we can invariably connect isolated Saracen colonization with localized modern brigandage, and track it from point to point by the moral taint it has left in the population, we are forced to ask ourselves if the recurring association can be due to mere chance? The great Saracen settle The trade in human flesh and blood seems to spring from some instinct inherent in the African race, like that of the predatory black ants, whose expeditions are always directed to the capture of prisoners of a different species. White captives, either to put to ransom or sell as slaves, were the choicest booty of the Saracen pirates of the Mediterranean; the slave trade is still the main obstacle to civ propensity, modified by circumstances, breaks out in the favorite practice of the Italian brigands of kidnapping to exact ransom. That it is no modern invention is shown by the instance above quoted — no doubt one of many of its practice by the Sicilian Saracens as far back as the thirteenth century. The hereditary or traditional character of brigandage is indicated by its localization for each band, while its component members are always changing, is yet perpetuated in its own district with a mysterious persistency, like some indigenous product of the soil. Its vague and undefined identity endures from generation to resort to it before they could continue their voyages. A great underground tank was also built at Lucera for the use of the Mussulman garrison, and all eastern nations construct subterranean reservoirs like the vast artificial lake which underlies part of Constantinople, and whose extent has nev generation, outlasting dynasties and surviving revolutions; so that we find the actual banditti of Fondi and Itri represented in Tasso's time by Marco Sciarra, and nearer to our own by Fra Diavolo. The territory of these outlaws is as definite as that of more regularly constituted communities, and the laws of their organ-er even been explored. ization far more unchanging. Who shall To analyze the Sicilian and Calabrian say that they have not subsisted for ten dialects would require the science of a centuries as well as for three? skilled philologist; but it is interesting to If moral evil could be compensated for note in a more superficial way how many by æsthetic good, the conquerors of south-Arabic words have crept into modern Italern Italy might put in a just plea for indul-ian, and how some have made their way gence, and monuments of architectural into our own language. To begin with, beauty, wherever they have been estab- the name Saracens, by which, however, lished, oblige us. to confess that Europe they never called themselves, but were has not been altogether a loser by the inheritance of the Saracens. In Sicily, though we have no remains of their actual period of domination, their eastern fancy touched with its visionary grace the more ponderous and material taste of their conquerors, and the combination created a group of buildings unique in Europe. All know how the Arab genius, triumphing supreme in Spain, has bequeathed to us in the very names of the Alhambra and the Alcazar a spell by which to summon to our fancy vistas of shining courts and airy colonnades as our ideal of all that is most exquisite in stone or marble. And who, visiting the beautiful Moorish remains of Ravello, and gazing across the Bay of Salerno to the ruins of Pæstum, and down on the sapphire cove where Amalfi nestles a thousand feet below, does not feel in his heart half tempted to forgive the pirate crews whose galleys so often furrowed that blue expanse, and brought terror and desolation to those smiling shores? known by other nations, is apparently derived from sarkin or sarrakin, strangers. The Italian darsena (dock yard), and our own arsenal come equally from dar-esse-na’h; giarra and jar, from the Arabic verb giarr, to draw; applied in Sicily to large vessels for holding oil, or small ones for sweetmeats. Marg, in Arabic a meadow, in Sicilian means a marsh. Perhaps the flower African marigold has brought its English-sounding name from the land of its birth. Cake, which we trace to the German kuchen, has a striking similarity of sound to kek, a sweet dish eaten in Africa as far back as the tenth century. Rokûk, Arabic for paper or parchment, applied figuratively to scroll-shaped ornaments, became rococo. Camlet has nothing to do with camel, but comes direct from khamlah, a hairy cloth; as cotton does from kattån, a weaver. Augia, an arch, gives us ogive; while azure, admiral, alembic, almanac, camphor, cipher, magazine, tariff, zero, and zenith," with many other scientific and commercial terms are as Arabic in form as they are in origin. The great subterranean reservoir on Cape Misenum, known as the Piscina Mirabilis, though generally attributed to the Romans, might, perhaps, with greater jus- In Italian cuffia (cap) from kufia, a headtice, be ascribed to the Saracens. There is dress; acciacchi, from as-shiakwa, ail at least the negative evidence that it is not ments; bali and baliato, magistrate and mentioned by any Latin author, while the magistracy, from wâli and waliato, an character of its architecture suggests, emir and his jurisdiction; cânova, (winethough it does not prove, Moorish origin. cellar), from khânuwa, a vaulted shop on The safety of the Mussulman garrison, cut the ground-floor; catinella, from catù, baoff from all communication with the land, sin; dogana, from diwán, a council or asmust naturally have depended on an artifi-sembly, in low Latin transformed into cial supply of water, of which the Ro-dohana; tiratoio (cloth-mill), from tiraz, mans, masters of the country, were inde- a silk-factory; with tarsia (inlaying), scipendent. Even the Roman fleet, for whose accommodation it is supposed to have been built, would hardly require so exceptional a contrivance on their own shores, while the Saracen galleys, whose crews could not scatter in safety on a hostile beach, may often have been obliged to albo (pale whitish), camicia, giubba, ga bella, and taccuino are among the more obvious and patent derivatives. Itria, the Arabic name of vermicelli as much manufactured in Sicily under the Saracens as it is at the present day - may have given its name to Itri, the notorious brigand colony near Gaeta; and if so, the coincidence would point to its having been founded, or at any rate occupied, and rechristened by the Mussulman fugitives from the Garigliano, and would be another link in the chain connecting the medieval with the modern plague of Italy. [Published by arrangement with HARPER & BROTHERS.] MACLEOD OF DARE. BY WILLIAM BLACK. CHAPTER XXVIII. A DISCLOSURE. nervous way. "I did not see the queen, -- He had handed the packet to his mother, and the old lady had adjusted her eyeglasses, and was turning over the various "She is very good-looking," said Lady Macleod. "Oh yes, she is very goodlooking. And that is her sister?" "Yes." AND now he was all eagerness to brave the first dragon in his way. the certain opposition of this proud old lady at Castle Dare. No doubt she would stand aghast at the mere mention of such a thing; perhaps in her sudden indignation she might utter sharp words that would rankle after-photographs. wards in the memory. In any case he knew the struggle would be long, and bitter, and harassing; and he had not the skill of speech to persuasively bend a woman's will. There was another wayimpossible, alas ! — he had thought of. If only he could have taken Gertrude White by the hand-if only he could have led her up the hall, and presented her to his mother, and said, "Mother, this is your daughter is she not fit to be the daughter of so proud a mother?". the fight would have been over. How could any one withstand the appeal of those fearless and tender clear eyes? Impatiently he waited for the end of dinner on the evening of his arrival; impatiently he heard Donald, the piper lad, play the brave salute the wild, shrill yell overcoming the low thunder of the Atlantic outside; and he paid but little attention to the old and familiar "Cumhadh na cloinne." Then Hamish put the whiskey and the claret on the table and withdrew. They were left alone. "And now, Keith," said his cousin Janet, with the wise gray eyes grown cheerful and kind, "you will tell us about all the people you saw in London; and was there much gayety going on? and did you see the queen at all? and did you give any fine dinners?" "How can I answer you all at once, Janet?" said he, laughing in a somewhat 66 Janet was looking over them too. "But where did you get all the photographs of her, Keith?" she said. They are from all sorts of places - Scarborough, Newcastle, Brighton "I got them from herself," said he. "Oh, do you know her so well?" "I know her very well. She was the most intimate friend of the people whose acquaintance I first made in London," he said simply. And then he turned to his mother: "I wish photographs could speak, mother, for then you might make her acquaintance, and as she is coming to the Highlands next year "We have no theatre in Mull, Keith," Lady Macleod said, with a smile. "But by that time she will not be an actress at all: did I not tell you that before?" he said eagerly. "Did I not tell you that? She is going to leave the stage perhaps sooner or later, but certainly by that time; and when she comes to the Highlands next year with her father, she will be travelling just like any one else. And I hope, mother, you won't let them think that we Highlanders are less hospitable than the people of London." He made the suggestion in an appar ently careless fashion; but there was a |