nous. Their prevailing tints are gray and brown, approaching
to red. Little white villages surrounded by trees, nestle in the valleys
or roost upon the lofty perpendicular sea-walls.

We had one fine sunset--a rich carmine flush that suffused the western
sky and cast a ruddy glow far over the sea.--Fine sunsets seem to be
rare in this part of the world--or at least, striking ones. They are
soft, sensuous, lovely--they are exquisite refined, effeminate, but we
have seen no sunsets here yet like the gorgeous conflagrations that flame
in the track of the sinking sun in our high northern latitudes.

But what were sunsets to us, with the wild excitement upon us of
approaching the most renowned of cities! What cared we for outward
visions, when Agamemnon, Achilles, and a thousand other heroes of the
great Past were marching in ghostly procession through our fancies? What
were sunsets to us, who were about to live and breathe and walk in actual
Athens; yea, and go far down into the dead centuries and bid in person
for the slaves, Diogenes and Plato, in the public market-place, or gossip
with the neighbors about the siege of Troy or the splendid deeds of
Marathon? We scorned to consider sunsets.

We arrived, and entered the ancient harbor of the Piraeus at last. We
dropped anchor within half a mile of the village. Away off, across the
undulating Plain of Attica, could be seen a little square-topped hill
with a something on it, which our glasses soon discovered to be the
ruined edifices of the citadel of the Athenians, and most prominent among
them loomed the venerable Parthenon. So exquisitely clear and pure is
this wonderful atmosphere that every column of the noble structure was
discernible through the telescope, and even the smaller ruins about it
assumed some semblance of shape. This at a distance of five or six
miles. In the valley, near the Acropolis, (the square-topped hill before
spoken of,) Athens itself could be vaguely made out with an ordinary
lorgnette. Every body was anxious to get ashore and visit these classic
localities as quickly as possible. No land we had yet seen had aroused
such universal interest among the passengers.

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 s