hat there is an hour's scramble through bushes and
over a rocky path. From these quarries was hewn the marble for the
Temple of Theseus, the Parthenon, the Propylae, the theaters, and other
public buildings, to which age has now given a soft and creamy tone; the
Pentelic marble must have been too brilliant for the eye, and its
dazzling luster was, no doubt, softened by the judicious use of color.
Fragments which we broke off had the sparkle and crystalline grain of
loaf-sugar, and if they were placed upon the table one would
unhesitatingly take them to sweeten his tea. The whole mountain-side is
overgrown with laurel, and we found wild flowers all the way to the
summit....

We looked almost directly down upon Marathon. There is the bay and the
curving sandy shore where the Persian galleys landed; here upon a spur,
jutting out from the hill, the Athenians formed before they encountered
the host in the plain, and there--alas! it was hidden by a hill--is the
mound where the one hundred and ninety-two Athenian dead are buried. It
is only a small field, perhaps six miles along the shore and a mile and
a half deep, and there is a considerable marsh on the north and a small
one at the south end. The victory at so little cost, of ten thousand
over a hundred thousand, is partially explained by the nature of the
ground; the Persians had not room enough to maneuver, and must have been
thrown into confusion on the skirts of the northern swamp, and if over
six thousand of them were slain, they must have been killed on the shore
in the panic of their embarkation. But still the shore is broad, level,
and firm, and the Greeks must have been convinced that the gods
themselves terrified the hearts of the barbarians, and enabled them to
discomfit a host which had chosen this plain as the most feasible in all
Attica for the action of cavalry.

AN EXCURSION TO SPARTA AND MAINA[58]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR

As we approached Sparta, the road descended to the banks of the Eurotas.
Traces of the ancient walls which restrained the river still remain in
places, but, in his shifting course, he has swept the most of them away,
and spread his gravelly deposits freely over the bottoms inclosed
between the spurs of the hills. Toward evening we saw, at a distance,
the white houses of modern Sparta, and presently some indications of the
ancient city. At first, the remains of terraces and ramparts, then the
unmistakable Hellenic walls, and, as the s