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was the only sign of disuse—I might almost say the only suggestion of antiquity. The buildings I had just been visiting had the brown tints of time on them ; age had written its wrinkles on corbels and arch and column ; and there were everywhere traces of mediajval irregularity in the architecture. But here the cut stones were smooth as the brow of youth. The pointing was perfect ; four hundred years had done nothing to it ; every arch was sym-metrical, and the gallery ran straight as an arrow. Nothing was wanting but the cannon, and a suffi-cient ignorance of engineering, to make one suppose that one was standing in some fort just built by the English, and just described by Mr. Labouchere as a waste of the people's money, and not under arches that had echoed their last to gunpowder before the Spanish Armada ever set sail for England. The castle above, like most ancient buildings, carried one away out of the present into the soft mystery of the past. This gallery, which was only one out of many, seemed to summon the past into the hard light of the present. And yet, when I rose again to the brilliance of the blue Cyprian sky, and saw around me the silvery Cyprian moiintains, and near me the bloom of the sea from whose foam Aphrodite rose, the charm of dreamland fell again over everything ; and I said to the passing moment again, ' Stay, thou art so fair.' It is true that I could see near me the unhappy prisoners at their work. But I could do no good by IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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