d flowers outside, and such a blue sky
above, that the little Byzantine temple had a cheerful, irresponsible
air, as if it were saying: "It's not my fault that people won't come
here. But if they won't, I'm not unhappy about it; the sunshine, the
vines, and I--we do very well together." The interior was bare, flooded
also with white daylight--so white that one blinked. And in this
whiteness my mind suddenly returned to Hellas. For Hellas had been
forgotten for the moment, owing to the haunting icons in the dark
churches of the town. Those silver-incrusted images had brought up a
vision of the uncounted millions to-day in Turkey, Greece, and Russia
who bow before them, the Christians of whom we know and think
comparatively so little. But now all these Eastern people vanished as
silently as they had come, and the past returned--the past, whose spell
summons us to Greece. For conspicuous in the white daylight of St.
Jason's were three antique columns, which, with other sculptured
fragments set in the walls, had been taken from an earlier pagan temple
to build this later church. And the spell does not break again in this
part of the island. Not far from St. Jason's is the tomb of Menekrates.
This monument was discovered in 1843, when one of the Venetian forts was
demolished. Beneath the foundations the workmen came upon funeral vases,
and upon digging deeper an ancient Greek cemetery was uncovered, with
many graves, various relics, and this tomb. It is circular, formed of
large blocks of stone closely joined without cement, and at present one
stands and looks down upon it, as though it were in a roofless cellar.
It bears round its low dome a metrical inscription in Greek, to the
effect that Menekrates, who was the representative at Corcyra (the old
name for Corfu) of his native town Eanthus, lost his life accidentally
by drowning; that this was a great sorrow to the community, for he was a
friend of the people; that his brother came from Eanthus, and, with the
aid of the Corcyreans, erected the monument. There is something
impressive to us in this simple memorial of grief set up before the days
of AEschylus, before the battle of Marathon--the commemoration of a
family sorrow in Corfu two thousand five hundred years ago. The
following is a Latin translation of the inscription:

"Tlasiadis memor ecce Menecrates hoc monumentum,
Ortum OEantheus, populus statuebat at illi,
Quippe benignus erat populo patronus, in a