to sea, and warned him never to show himself in that port again while he lived.  This kind of conversation did no good, further than to give a sort of dismal interest to our quarantine-breaking expedition, and so we dropped it.  We made the entire circuit of the town without seeing any body but one man, who stared at us curiously, but said nothing, and a dozen persons asleep on the ground before their doors, whom we walked among and never woke—­but we woke up dogs enough, in all conscience—­we always had one or two barking at our heels, and several times we had as many as ten and twelve at once.  They made such a preposterous din that persons aboard our ship said they could tell how we were progressing for a long time, and where we were, by the barking of the dogs.  The clouded moon still favored us.  When we had made the whole circuit, and were passing among the houses on the further side of the town, the moon came out splendidly, but we no longer feared the light.  As we approached a well, near a house, to get a drink, the owner merely glanced at us and went within.  He left the quiet, slumbering town at our mercy.  I record it here proudly, that we didn’t do any thing to it.

Seeing no road, we took a tall hill to the left of the distant Acropolis for a mark, and steered straight for it over all obstructions, and over a little rougher piece of country than exists any where else outside of the State of Nevada, perhaps.  Part of the way it was covered with small, loose stones—­we trod on six at a time, and they all rolled.  Another part of it was dry, loose, newly-ploughed ground.  Still another part of it was a long stretch of low grape-vines, which were tanglesome and troublesome, and which we took to be brambles.  The Attic Plain, barring the grape-vines, was a barren, desolate, unpoetical waste—­I wonder what it was in Greece’s Age of Glory, five hundred years before Christ?

In the neighborhood of one o’clock in the morning, when we were heated with fast walking and parched with thirst, Denny exclaimed, “Why, these weeds are grape-vines!” and in five minutes we had a score of bunches of large, white, delicious grapes, and were reaching down for more when a dark shape rose mysteriously up out of the shadows beside us and said “Ho!” And so we left.

In ten minutes more we struck into a beautiful road, and unlike some others we had stumbled upon at intervals, it led in the right direction.  We followed it.  It was broad, and smooth, and white—­handsome and in perfect repair, and shaded on both sides for a mile or so with single ranks of trees, and also with luxuriant vineyards.  Twice we entered and stole grapes, and the second time somebody shouted at us from some invisible place.  Whereupon we left again.  We speculated in grapes no more on that side of Athens.