oats unload their cargoes.

All old subjects and yet ever new; each has been painted a thousand
times, and in as many different lights and perspectives. And yet each
canvas differs from its fellows as do two ripples or two morning skies.

For weeks we drift about. One day Carlotta, the fishwife up the
Fondamenta della Pallada, makes us our coffee; the next Luigi buys it
of some smart cafe on the Piazza. This with a roll, a bit of Gorgonzola,
and a bunch of grapes, or half a dozen figs, is our luncheon, to which
is added two curls of blue smoke, one from Luigi's pipe and the other
from my cigarette. Then we fall to work again.

But this will never do! While I have been loafing with Luigi not only
has the summer slipped away, but the cool winds of October have crept
down from the Alps. There are fresh subjects to tackle--some I have
never seen. Athens beckons to me. The columns of the Parthenon loom up!

*****

If there are half a dozen ways of getting into Papendrecht--there is
only one of reaching Athens--that is, if you start from Venice. Trieste
first, either by rail or boat, and then aboard one of the Austrian
Lloyds, and so on down the Adriatic to Patras.

It is October, remember--when every spear of grass from a six months'
drought--the customary dry spell--is burnt to a crisp. It will rain
to-morrow, or next week, they will tell you--but it doesn't--never has
in October--and never will. Strange to say, you never miss it--neither
in the color of the mountains flanking the Adriatic or in any of the
ports on the way down, or in Patras itself. The green note to which I
have been accustomed--which I have labored over all my life--is lacking,
and a new palette takes its place--of mauve, violet, indescribable
blues, and evanescent soap-bubble reds. The slopes of the hills are
mother-of-pearl, their tops melting into cloud shadows so delicate in
tone that you cannot distinguish where one leaves off and the other
begins.

And it is so in Patras, except for a riotous, defiant pine--green as a
spring cabbage or a newly painted shutter--that sucks its moisture from
nobody knows where--hasn't any, perhaps, and glories in its shame. All
along the railroad from the harbor of Patras to the outskirts of Athens
it is the same--bare fields, bare hills, streets and roads choked with
dust. And so, too, when you arrive at the station and take the omnibus
for the Grand Bretagne.

By this time you are accustomed to it--in fact y