could not hunt up guides and keepers--we must be on the ship
before daylight. So we argued. This was all very fine, but when we came
to break the gate, we could not do it. We moved around an angle of the
wall and found a low bastion--eight feet high without--ten or twelve
within. Denny prepared to scale it, and we got ready to follow. By dint
of hard scrambling he finally straddled the top, but some loose stones
crumbled away and fell with a crash into the court within. There was
instantly a banging of doors and a shout. Denny dropped from the wall in
a twinkling, and we retreated in disorder to the gate. Xerxes took that
mighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christ, when his five
millions of soldiers and camp-followers followed him to Greece, and if we
four Americans could have remained unmolested five minutes longer, we
would have taken it too.

The garrison had turned out--four Greeks. We clamored at the gate, and
they admitted us. [Bribery and corruption.]

We crossed a large court, entered a great door, and stood upon a pavement
of purest white marble, deeply worn by footprints. Before us, in the
flooding moonlight, rose the noblest ruins we had ever looked upon--the
Propylae; a small Temple of Minerva; the Temple of Hercules, and the
grand Parthenon. [We got these names from the Greek guide, who didn't
seem to know more than seven men ought to know.] These edifices were all
built of the whitest Pentelic marble, but have a pinkish stain upon them
now. Where any part is broken, however, the fracture looks like fine
loaf sugar. Six caryatides, or marble women, clad in flowing robes,
support the portico of the Temple of Hercules, but the porticos and
colonnades of the other structures are formed of massive Doric and Ionic
pillars, whose flutings and capitals are still measurably perfect,
notwithstanding the centuries that have gone over them and the sieges
they have suffered. The Parthenon, originally, was two hundred and
twenty-six feet long, one hundred wide, and seventy high, and had two
rows of great columns, eight in each, at either end, and single rows of
seventeen each down the sides, and was one of the most graceful and
beautiful edifices ever erected.

Most of the Parthenon's imposing columns are still standing, but the roof
is gone. It was a perfect building two hundred and fifty years ago, when
a shell dropped into the Venetian magazine stored here, and the explosion
which fo