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Count Sciarra was engaged in a third monologue at the head of the table. He was talking at the same time to Mrs. Bergmann, Lady Irene, and Lady Hyacinth about the devil. "Ah que j'aime le diable!" he was saying in low, tender tones. "The devil who creates your beauty to lure us to destruction, the devil who puts honey into the voice of the siren, the dolce sirena
Vere saw his astonishment, and swiftly, with a parting wave of her hand to Ruffo, she disappeared, leaving her protégé to run off gayly with his booty to his comrades of the Sirena del Mare. "I can see the boat, Vere," said Hermione, when the girl came back, her eyes still gleaming with memories of the fun of the cigarette game with Ruffo. "Where, Madre?"
If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the 'Divina Commedia', which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting "Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena, Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago."
The Shepherd's Sirena; also the Moon Calf; Satire on the Masculine Affectations of Women, and the the effeminate disguises of the Men, in those times. Elegies upon several occasions. These are introduced by the vision of Ben Johnson on the Muse of his friend Michael Drayton, wherein he very particularly enumerates and praises his several compositions.
Then they went through the Porta della Sirena, an entrance arch into a forgotten quarter of the city, and continued along a road bordered on one side by marshy lands of exuberant vegetation and on the other by the long mud wall of a grange, through whose mortar were sticking out fragments of stones or columns.
We find it once more, intermingling with a certain formal strain, in Drayton's Shepherds' Sirena containing the delightful song, with its subtle interchange of dactylic and iambic rhythms, so admirably characteristic of the author of the Agincourt ballad: In this pervading impulse of pure and spontaneous pastoral the soul of what is sweet and winning in things common and familiar as our household fairies blends with the fresh glamour of early love and the dainty delights of an ideal world, where despair is only less sweet than fruition, and love only less divine than chastity, where, as Drayton frankly tells us,
If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the 'Divina Commedia', which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting "Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena, Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago."
I am learning the name of every locality in the plain, of every peak among the mountains at our back. "And that little ridge of stone," says my companion, " do you see it, jutting into the fields down there? It has a queer name. We call it La Sirena." La Sirena.... It is good to live in a land where such memories cling to old rocks.
The ruddy oranges hung in clusters over the old walls which lined both sides of the road, walls so old that history stops before them doubtfully. And the perfume of the sweet rain mingling with that of the fruit was like nothing Merrihew had ever sensed before. They finally drew up in the courtyard of the Hotel de la Sirena, and the long ride was at an end.
The near-by "Sirena" mine was reputed to have in its personnel more men who lived by stealing ore than honest workmen.
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