JOURNEY TO CATANIA. 
31 
contract is concluded. You may be left, as I was on the road 
to Syracuse, in the middle of the public highway, without 
horses or driver, an object of mingled wonder and derision to 
the inhabitants of a populous village—stared at as the man 
who wouldn’t pay; ridiculed as the man who couldn’t go 
without horses; abused in an unknown and abominable 
tongue, for refusing to be legitimately swindled; and com¬ 
pelled, in the end, to give an additional huono mano for cre¬ 
ating the difficulty and losing temper. Good humor and 
small change are the only locomotive powers by which you 
can get on in Sicily. The one keeps you in a state of self- 
satisfaction ; the other greases the wheels, makes the whip 
crack, and the horses go. Depend upon it, you will never 
gain an inch by a rebellious spirit against customs which you 
can not change. 
Of the character of the country in the interior of Sicily, I 
can only speak as it appeared to me in the month of October, 
after the parching heats of summer. The brilliancy of the 
skies and the salubrity of the climate at this season of the 
year can not be surpassed in any part of the world; but I am 
not sure that it is the best season to enjoy the scenery. Cer¬ 
tainly the parched and barren aspect of the whole country 
gave me a very unfavorable opinion of the fertility of the soil, 
or the beauties of Sicilian scenery. Nearly the entire tract 
of a hundred and fifty miles lying between Palermo and Cata¬ 
nia is a perfect desert of rocky mountains and barren valleys, 
without water or trees, and nothing to indicate any means by 
which the inhabitants subsist, save here and there a miser¬ 
able-looking spot of terraced ground, scratched over, and 
dotted with the stumps of grape-vines. Yet they do live, and 
apparently without labor ; for, during my whole journey to 
Catania, I do not think I saw a dozen men at work. An in¬ 
telligent Italian, however, informed me that the land, though 
apparently so sterile, yields abundant crops when cultivated, 
and requires very little plowing. The villages throughout the 
interior are the dirtiest and most wretched-looking places 
imaginable ; filled with beggars and ragged idlers, and dilap¬ 
idated to the last habitable degree. Syria, or the Holy Land, 
