a little platform between the two highest
peaks, about 3,500 feet above the sea.

On the day of our visit, its pillars of pale bluish-gray limestone rose
against a wintry sky, its guardian oaks were leafless, and the wind
whistled over its heaps of ruin; yet its symmetry was like that of a
perfect statue, wherein you do not notice the absence of color, and I
felt that no sky and no season could make it more beautiful. For its
builder was Ictinus, who created the Parthenon. It was erected by the
Phigalians, out of gratitude to Apollo the Helper, who kept from their
city a plague which ravaged the rest of the Peloponnesus. Owing to its
secluded position, it has escaped the fate of other temples, and might
be restored from its own undestroyed materials. The cella had been
thrown down, but thirty-five out of thirty-eight columns are still
standing. Through the Doric shafts you look upon a wide panorama of gray
mountains, melting into purple in the distance, and crowned by arcs of
the far-off sea. On one hand is Ithome and the Messenian Gulf, on the
other the Ionian Sea and the Strophades....

We now trotted down the valley, over beautiful meadows, which were
uncultivated except in a few places where the peasants were plowing for
maize, and had destroyed every trace of the road. The hills on both
sides began to be fringed with pine, while the higher ridges on our
right were clothed with woods of oak. I was surprised at the luxuriant
vegetation of this region. The laurel and mastic became trees, the pine
shot to a height of one hundred feet, and the beech and sycamore began
to appear. Some of the pines had been cut for ship-timber, but in the
rudest and most wasteful way, only the limbs which had the proper curve
being chosen for ribs. I did not see a single sawmill in the
Peloponnesus; but I am told that there are a few in Euboea and
Acarnania....

As we approached Olympia, I could almost have believed myself among the
pine-hills of Germany or America. In the old times this must have been a
lovely, secluded region, well befitting the honored repose of Xenophon,
who wrote his works here. The sky became heavier as the day wore on, and
the rain, which had spared us so long, finally inclosed us in its misty
circle. Toward evening we reached a lonely little house, on the banks of
the Alpheus. Nobody was at home, but we succeeded in forcing a door and
getting shelter for our baggage. Francois had supper nearly ready before
the