It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you are in the heart of Italy.  Accidental villas among olive trees appear; and men-servants watering the cactuses.  Black victorias drive in between pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them.  It is at once momentary and astonishingly intimate—­to be displayed before the eyes of a foreigner.  And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an omnibus.  And what I should like would be to get out among the fields, sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of earth—­ Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes.

Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the night.  The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he wrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all white in the moonlight.  The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which floated round the globe with the green shade on it.  The Italian gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned. ...  And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an intolerable weariness—­sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at monuments—­he’d have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant. ...  “O—­h,” Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to get something—­the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled, obese, was opening the door and going off to have a wash.

So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking down the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the Parthenon came upon him in a clap.

“By Jove!” he thought, “we must be nearly there!” and he stuck his head out of the window and got the air full in his face.

It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance should be able to say straight off something very much to the point about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all emotions whatsoever.  For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had followed the tram lines a mile or so out; and followed them a mile or so back; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys; had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and of Maggi’s consomme; children had trodden on his toes; the place smelt of bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out opposite his hotel.  There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among coffee-cups; which he read.  But what could he do after dinner?