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BETWEEN ITALY AND THE EAST 29 for the remotest ends of the earth. My friends' faces, in spite of gossip and laughter, looked wan in the shadow, and seemed to be touched with seriousness ; and as I moved away from them a sense of illimitable .distances, stars and sea winds, and the riddle of human destiny, wove itself into the consciousness of the moment, and made all life seem larger. I descended to the saloon in quest of some sort of supper ; and the first sound that greeted me was a female voice from America—that of a young lady sandwiched between two male admirers—declaring in rinsing accents that ' she couldn't stand Jerusalem.' The last thing I heard before I retired to rest—which we all did before we had left the harbour—was the same young lady informing the same gentlemen—she called one ' Bill,' the other she called ' Darling '— that she had learnt in Paris a new song for the banjo, ' lovely, but so wicked that Mama forbade her sing-ing it.' The following days were for the most part suffi-ciently weary and monotonous. The Ionian Islands lifted their snowy summits up to the clouds as if modelled from Turner's pictures ; my eye lingered on the jagged outlines of Crete—that country seen by so many, explored or visited by so few. In front of these classical scenes the admired of Bill and Darling paced the deck in a sky-blue ' Tam-o'-Shanter,' with Bill on one side of her, and sedulous Darling on . the other, each provoking her wit and assailing her with devoted glances; but nothing else impressed

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