t is a large, round apartment, rising to the hight
of forty-nine feet, and of about the same width, the layers of masonry
gradually approaching one another until a single stone caps the whole;
not conical in shape, however, but like a beehive. A single monstrous
stone, twenty-seven feet long and twenty wide, is placed over the
doorway. The whole is buried with earth, and covered with a growth of
grass and shrubs, and a passage leads from it into a smaller chamber
hewn in the solid rock, in which our guide lighted the fuel he had
gathered. The gloomy walls were lighted up for a moment, then when the
fire died away, we returned to the open air. A little further on is the
famous gateway with two lionesses carved in relief above--the armorial
bearings, we may call it, of the city--and in every direction are seen
massive walls, foundation-stones, ruins of gates and of subterraneous
chambers like the first we visited, conical hillocks, probably
containing others in equally good preservation, and other marks of the
busy hand of man--'_Spuren ordnender Menschenhand unter dem Gestraeuch_.'
Sidney Smith says: 'It is impossible to feel affection beyond
seventy-eight degrees or below twenty degrees of Fahrenheit.... Man only
lives to shiver or to perspire.' I think it is so with the sublime and
beautiful, and deeply as I felt in the abstract the privilege I enjoyed
in standing on the citadel of Agamemnon, and seeing the most venerable
ruins that Europe can boast, that keen March wind was too much for me,
and I was not sorry to return to the khan, where, sitting cross-legged
on the floor, we ate with our fingers a roast chicken dissected with the
one knife of the family, and drank a bumper of resinous wine.

After dinner we remounted and rode back through the broad plain to
Argos, traversed its narrow, dirty streets, stared at by the Argive
youth, examined its grass-grown theatre, cast wistful eyes at the lofty
citadel of Larissa, which time forbade us to ascend, then wound along
the foot of the mountain-range, saw at a distance on the seashore a spot
of green, which we were told was Lerna, where Hercules slew the hydra,
and near the road an old ruined pyramid, which we afterward examined
more closely, then followed a mountain-path, catching now and then a
glimpse of the bay, following the crest of the ridge into the valley
beyond. On one of the undulations of the path we passed over the site of
an ancient city, evidenced only by tha