It grew worse the farther I went away from it, and for two months I have longed for Athens, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis.  I wanted to stand and feast my soul upon the glories which were such living memories, All through Egypt and up the Nile my one wish was to live long enough and for the weeks to fly fast enough for me to get back to Athens.  Now I am here for the second time, and for as long as I wish to remain.

We came sailing into the harbor just at sunset.  Such a sunset!  Such blue in the Mediterranean!  Such a soft haze on the purple hills!  How the gods must have loved Athens to place her in the garden spot of all the earth; to pour into her lap such treasures of art, and to endow her masters with power to create such an art!  The approach is so beautiful.  Our big black Russian ship cut her way in utter silence through the bluest of blue seas, with scarcely a ripple on the sunlit waters, between amethyst islands studded with emerald fields, making straight for that which was at one time the bravest, noblest, most courageous, most beautiful country on earth.

 “The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! 
    Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
  Where grew the arts of war and peace,
    Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung! 
  Eternal summer gilds them yet,
  But all except their sun is set.”

Byron’s statue stands in the square, surrounded by evergreens; his picture is in the Ecole Polytechnique, and his memory and his songs are revered throughout all Greece.  How her beauty tore at his soul!  How her love for freedom met with an echo in his own heart!  No wonder he sang, with such a theme!  It was enough to give a stone song and the very rocks utterance.

It was Sunday, and as we drove through the clean, white streets, feeling absolutely hushed with the beauty which assailed us on every side, suddenly we heard the sound of music, mournful as a dirge—­a martial dirge.  And presently we saw approaching us the saddest, most touching yet awful procession I ever beheld.  It was a military funeral.  First came the band; then came two men bearing aloft the cover to the casket, wreathed in flowers and streaming with crape.  Then, borne in an open coffin by four young officers of his staff, with bands of crape on their arms and knots of crape on their swords, was the dead officer, an old, gray-haired general, dressed in the full uniform of the Greek army, with his browned, wrinkled, deep-lined hands crossed over his sword.  The casket was shallow, and thus he was exposed to the view of the gaping multitude, without even a glass lid to cover his bronzed face, and with the glaring sun beating down upon his closed eyes and noble gray head.  Just behind him they led his riderless black horse, with his master’s boots reversed in the stirrups and the empty saddle knotted with crape.  It was at once majestic, heartrending, and terrible.  It unnerved me, and yet it was not surprising to have such a moving spectacle greet me on my return to Greece.