Four more of our passengers were anxious to visit Athens, and started half an hour after we returned; but they had not been ashore five minutes till the police discovered and chased them so hotly that they barely escaped to their boat again, and that was all.  They pursued the enterprise no further.

We set sail for Constantinople to-day, but some of us little care for that.  We have seen all there was to see in the old city that had its birth sixteen hundred years before Christ was born, and was an old town before the foundations of Troy were laid—­and saw it in its most attractive aspect.  Wherefore, why should we worry?

Two other passengers ran the blockade successfully last night.  So we learned this morning.  They slipped away so quietly that they were not missed from the ship for several hours.  They had the hardihood to march into the Piraeus in the early dusk and hire a carriage.  They ran some danger of adding two or three months’ imprisonment to the other novelties of their Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.  I admire “cheek.”—­[Quotation from the Pilgrims.]—­But they went and came safely, and never walked a step.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and deserted—­a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all Greece in these latter ages.  We saw no ploughed fields, very few villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and hardly ever an isolated house.  Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently.  What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

I suppose that ancient Greece and modern Greece compared, furnish the most extravagant contrast to be found in history.  George I., an infant of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and generals of the Golden Age of Greece.  The fleets that were the wonder of the world when the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly handful of fishing-smacks now, and the manly people that performed such miracles of valor at Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered slaves to-day.  The classic Illyssus has gone dry, and so have all the sources of Grecian wealth and greatness.  The nation numbers only eight hundred thousand souls, and there is poverty and misery and mendacity enough among them to furnish forty millions and be liberal about it.  Under King Otho the revenues of the State were five millions of dollars—­raised from a tax of one-tenth of all the agricultural products of the land (which tenth the farmer had to bring to the royal granaries on pack-mules any distance not exceeding six leagues) and from extravagant taxes on