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A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill from the mainland of Ireland; and, once across this loch, one finds himself in an entirely different country. The Scotch impression is strong, and the people, to commence with, are Presbyterians.
Of real temples, as distinct from shrines, Phoenicia Proper does not present to us so much as a single specimen. To obtain any idea of them, we must quit the mother country, and betake ourselves to the colonies, especially to those island colonies which have been less subjected than the mainland to the destructive ravages of barbarous conquerors, and the iconoclasm of fanatical populations.
That evening, the twenty-second of September, we sailed into a harbor on the island of Chios, the birth-place of the philosopher Pythagoras. It is an island twenty-seven miles long, lying near the mainland. The next morning we passed Cos and Rhodes.
In these rude, and, according to our estimate, comfortless cabins, they hibernate, rather than live the life of civilized human beings, for eight months of the year. After leaving Tromsöe our course is north-northeast, crossing wild fjords and skirting the mainland.
When at Messina, Garibaldi received a letter from Victor Emmanuel, forbidding him to make any attempt to cross the Straits of Messina, and carry the war on to the mainland; but he heeded it not, or, what is perhaps most probable, he read between the lines, that having succeeded so far, greatly to the surprise of all the wiseacres among European diplomatists, he was to follow up his good fortune, and "go ahead."
Each trip to the mainland, the boat came filled with refugees from the city of doom the sick, the maimed, the sorrowing many with fearful bodily injuries inflicted by the storm, and others with deeper wounds of grief; mothers whose babies had been torn from their arms, children whose parents were missing, fathers whose entire families were lost a dazed and tearless throng, such as Danté might have met in his passage through Inferno.
We set sail, and having touched at several ports of the mainland and some of the eastern islands, we put out to sea, and were overtaken by a sudden gust of wind that obliged the captain to furl his sails, and to take all other necessary precautions to prevent the danger that threatened us.
The Captain, thinking she was ready to go ashore, followed. She swung about, and stamped her foot, angrily. "Why don't you men know how to act! Why doesn't he know how to behave himself!" She turned back and looked out across the Sound. The mainland showed dim through the haze of the Indian Summer morning. "Beth, I hate to see you worrying like this," said the Captain, a tremor in his voice.
Here, then, on a sandbank washed once by every high tide, but now joined to the mainland by so unromantic a feature as the gasworks, a tower begun by Dom João II., and designed, it is said, by Garcia de Resende, was finished by Dom Manoel about 1520 and dedicated to São Vicente, the patron of Lisbon. The tower is not of very great size, perhaps some forty feet square by about one hundred high.
Faversham has half Rochester's fortune, for it stands where the road touches an arm or creek of the Swale, that important navigable waterway, an arm of the sea which separates Sheppey from the mainland. The Swale there served the road and made of Faversham a port, but the road did not cross it and therefore the Swale, unlike the Medway, was never an obstacle or a defence.
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