followed the direction, and though the nymph changed shape many times he kept his hold and she submitted to him and they were married.  In process of time she bore a child, but all the while she had never spoken a word.  The wise woman, consulted again, told Janni to take the child and pretend to lay it on the fire, when his wife would speak.  He obeyed again, but made a slip, and the child, falling into the fire, was burned to death, whereupon the wife fled to the sea and was never seen again.  This was told me in all seriousness as of a contemporary event, and was evidently held as history.  I bought from a peasant one of the well-known three-sided prisms with archaic intaglios of animals on the faces, and had the curiosity to inquire the virtues of it, for I was told that it was greatly valued and had been worn by his wife, who reluctantly gave it up.  He replied that it had the power of preventing the mother’s milk from failing prematurely.

We passed through Selinos, where the riflers of the antique necropolis brought me quantities of glass found in the graves, and a few bronze and gold ornaments; and when I had loaded myself and my attendants with all the glass we could safely carry, the people begged me still to buy, if only for a piastre each piece, what they had accumulated for want of a buyer.  But what is found in this district is mainly or entirely of a late period, that of the Roman occupation of the island, I suppose, for we found no archaic objects of any kind, or early inscriptions, and only a few in late characters.  But the ride through this section of the island is one of the most delightful one could take, so far as I know, in classical lands.  The kindly, hospitable Seliniotes, known for centuries as the bravest of all the Cretan clans, persecuted with all the cruelty of Venetian craft in the days when the island city ruled the island sea, always refractory under foreign rule and often unruly under their own régime, seem to have enjoyed in the later centuries of Roman rule and the earlier of the Byzantine a great prosperity, if one may judge from the evidence of the necropolis, the graves in which yield a singular indication of a well-distributed wealth.  These graves lie for great distances along every road leading to what must have been the principal centre of the civilization, though there are no ruins to mark its location.  This singular absence of ancient ruin indicates a peculiarity in the civilization of that section of the island which history gives no clue to.  Northward, near the sea, there are the remains of great Pelasgic cities, of which when I first traveled in the island the walls were in stupendous condition, but of which at this visit I had found hardly a trace—­the islanders had pulled them down to get stone for their houses.  The site of Polyrhenia, connected in tradition with the return of Agamemnon from Troy, was one of the finest Pelasgic ruins I have ever seen when I first visited it, but on this visit I could hardly find the locality, and of the splendid polygonal wall I saw in 1865 not a stone remained.