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harbour. The town was little more than a single esplanade, curving prettily round a miniature port. The houses were all of stone, and were most of them neatly whitewashed, and had it not been for several strange features, I could almost have fancied it a fishing towTn in Jersey or in Cornwall. One of these features was the collection of outlandish craft in the harbour, little lean misshapen schooners, mostly from Asia Minor ; another was a Greek campanile ; and another, which I might not have seen if I had not already been told of it, wras a row of wiiite posts on the quay, for securing the ships' cables. They were columns of snowy marble, taken from a temple of Venus. Whilst I was studying this scene, the castle was directly behind me, separated from the road on which I stood by a deep artificial ditch. It was the last building at that end of the town, and its sea-ward walls had their base splashed by the breakers. I had already seen it from a distance, and its aspect I had not thought interesting. It wTas simply a square, plainly of great size, with bastions at three of its corners, and a round tower at the fourth. It seemed, indeed, to be less a castle than a fortress. But, now that I turned to look at it near at hand, I found it impres-sive in a way I had not expected. I knew that it dated from the days of the Byzantine emperors, and that, though since their time it had been enlarged and altered, the last hands to touch it had been those of Venetian masons, four hundred years ago. 204 IN-AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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