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nothing else, were the best material in the world for building cheap pig-styes. My informant added, Ί have every reason to believe that such towns do really exist. A year or two ago I had here a Scotch mason and carpenter, and took them to the opposite coast with me for a cruise in a Greek ca'ique. On that occasion I went nowhere on shore myself, but these men did at one place, in the neighbourhood of which there was said to be a ruined city. They came back to the vessel in the evening, telling me that the whole of the day they had been walking amongst friezes and architraves, columns, and plinths, and capitals—a wilderness of old carved marble.' Will the Protestant reader be shocked when I make to him an abrupt confession—that this day, which I had profaned by a pilgrimage to a Papist abbey, was Sunday? He will, of course, infer—and rightly—that I did not go to church ; but there was an excellent reason for that—there was no church to go to. In the evening, however, I at least made a good end—and an end which befitted at once the Island of Flowers, the Island of Greek Poetry, the Christian Sunday that was ending, and the Catholic centuries that had ended. Mr. St. John, who was familiar with both ancient and modern Greek, had been telling me at dinner that in this part of the island the language of the peasants retained words and phrases not to be found elsewhere, as old as the days of Homer. One example of them he gave me 222 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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