The road to Marathon led through orchards of cherry-trees white with blossoms, through green vineyards, past groves of olive-trees which look old enough to have seen the Persian hosts, through groups of cypress-trees, such noble sentinels of deathless evergreen; through fields of wild-cabbage blooms, making the air as sweet as the alfalfa-fields of the West; across the Valanaris by a little bridge, and suddenly an isolated farmhouse with a wine-press, and then—­Marathon!

 “The mountains look on Marathon,
    And Marathon looks on the sea,
  And musing there an hour alone,
    I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
  For standing by the Persian’s grave,
  I could not deem myself a slave!”

Marathon is only a vast plain, but what a plain!  It has only a small mound in the centre to break its smoothness, but what courage, what patriotism, what nobility that mound covers!  It was there, many authorities say, that all the Athenians were buried who fell at Marathon, although Byron claims that it covers the Persian dead.

How Greece has always loved freedom!  In the Ecole Polytechnique are three Turkish battle-flags and some shells and cannon-balls from a war so recent that the flags have scarcely had time to dry or the shells to cool.  What a pity, what an unspeakable pity, that all the glory of Greece lies in the past, and that the time of her power has gone forever!  Nothing but her brave, undaunted spirit remains, and never can she live again the glories of her Salamis, her Marathon, her Thermopylae.

We have seen Athens in all her guises, the Acropolis in all her moods, at sunrise, in a thunder-storm, in the glare of mid-day, at sunset, and yet we saved the best for the climax.  On the last night we were in Athens we saw the Acropolis by moonlight.  We nearly upset the whole Greek government to accomplish this, for the King has issued an edict that only one night in the month may visitors be admitted, and that is the night of the full moon.  But I had returned to Athens with this one idea in my mind, and if I had been obliged to go to the King myself I would have done so, and I know that I would have come away victorious.  He never could have had the heart to refuse me.

It is impossible.  I utterly abandon the idea of making even my nearest and dearest see what I saw and hear what I heard and think what I thought on that matchless night.  There was just a breath of wind.  The mountains and hills rose all around us, Lykabettos, Kolonos—­the home of Sophocles—­Hymettos, and Pentelikon with its marble quarries, made an undulating line of gray against the horizon, while away at the left was the Hill of Mars.  How still it was!  How wonderful!  The rows of lights from the city converged towards the foot of the Acropolis like the topaz rays in a queen’s diadem.  The blue waters of the harbor glittered in the pale light.  A chime of bells rang out the hour, coming faintly up to us like an echo.  And above us, bathed, shrouded, swimming in silver light, was the Parthenon.  The only flowers that grow at the foot of the Parthenon are the marguerites, the white-petaled, golden-hearted daisies, and even in the moonlight these starry flowers bend their tender gaze upon their god.