But bad news came.  The commandant of the Piraeus came in his boat, and said we must either depart or else get outside the harbor and remain imprisoned in our ship, under rigid quarantine, for eleven days!  So we took up the anchor and moved outside, to lie a dozen hours or so, taking in supplies, and then sail for Constantinople.  It was the bitterest disappointment we had yet experienced.  To lie a whole day in sight of the Acropolis, and yet be obliged to go away without visiting Athens!  Disappointment was hardly a strong enough word to describe the circumstances.

All hands were on deck, all the afternoon, with books and maps and glasses, trying to determine which “narrow rocky ridge” was the Areopagus, which sloping hill the Pnyx, which elevation the Museum Hill, and so on.  And we got things confused.  Discussion became heated, and party spirit ran high.  Church members were gazing with emotion upon a hill which they said was the one St. Paul preached from, and another faction claimed that that hill was Hymettus, and another that it was Pentelicon!  After all the trouble, we could be certain of only one thing—­the square-topped hill was the Acropolis, and the grand ruin that crowned it was the Parthenon, whose picture we knew in infancy in the school books.

We inquired of every body who came near the ship, whether there were guards in the Piraeus, whether they were strict, what the chances were of capture should any of us slip ashore, and in case any of us made the venture and were caught, what would be probably done to us?  The answers were discouraging:  There was a strong guard or police force; the Piraeus was a small town, and any stranger seen in it would surely attract attention—­capture would be certain.  The commandant said the punishment would be “heavy;” when asked “how heavy?” he said it would be “very severe”—­that was all we could get out of him.

At eleven o’clock at night, when most of the ship’s company were abed, four of us stole softly ashore in a small boat, a clouded moon favoring the enterprise, and started two and two, and far apart, over a low hill, intending to go clear around the Piraeus, out of the range of its police.  Picking our way so stealthily over that rocky, nettle-grown eminence, made me feel a good deal as if I were on my way somewhere to steal something.  My immediate comrade and I talked in an undertone about quarantine laws and their penalties, but we found nothing cheering in the subject.  I was posted.  Only a few days before, I was talking with our captain, and he mentioned the case of a man who swam ashore from a quarantined ship somewhere, and got imprisoned six months for it; and when he was in Genoa a few years ago, a captain of a quarantined ship went in his boat to a departing ship, which was already outside of the harbor, and put a letter on board to be taken to his family, and the authorities imprisoned him three months for it, and then conducted him and his ship fairly