silver veil over her brilliant beauty, so that
you see her through a gauzy mist, which presently tantalizes you into
blinking your tired eyes and wondering what she is so deftly
concealing. It is like the feeling which assails you when you see a
veiled statue. You long for the sculptor to chisel away the marble
gauze and reveal the features. And when the craving becomes
intolerable, lo! Greece, the past mistress of the art of beauty,
grants your desire, and with the regal gift of a goddess brings your
soul into its fruition. Cleopatra would have tantalized and left your
heart to eat itself out in hopeless longing. But Cleopatra was only a
queen; Venus was a goddess.

Names which were but names to you before become living realities now.
We are crossing the Attic plain, and from that we find ourselves in
the Thracian plain. What girl has not heard her brother spout
concerning these names, famous in Greek history? Then we are in
Megara, on the lovely blue Bay of Salamis. From Megara the Bay of
Salamis becomes Saronic Gulf, and after an hour or two of its
unspeakable beauty we cross over to Corinth and find, if possible,
that the blues of the Gulf of Corinth are even more sapphire, that its
purples are even more amethyst, that its greens are more emerald than
the blues and purples and greens of Salamis.

From Corinth the road skirts the sea, and all these white plains are
devoted to the drying of currants. At Sikyon, called "cucumber town,"
but originally, with the mystic beauty of the ancient Greeks, called
"poppy town," the American school at Athens has made some wonderful
excavations. It has discovered the supports of the stage of the famous
theatre there. Then, still with the sea before us, we are at Aegium, a
name full of memories of ancient Greece. It has olive, currant, grape,
and mulberry plantations, and lies shrouded and bedded in beauty and
romance. There, over a high iron bridge, we cross a rushing mountain
torrent and are at Patras, in the moonlight, with our big ship waiting
to take us across the Adriatic Sea to Brindisi.

It was with real pain that we left Greece. I would like to go back
to-morrow. But there were reasons for reaching Italy without further
delay, and we hurried through Corfu with only a day there to see its
loveliness, instead of a week, as we would have liked. The Empress of
Austria's villa lies tucked up on a hill-side, in a mass of orange,
lemon, cypress, and magnolia trees. Such an enc