A MORNING IN ATHENS.

JUSTIN MCCARTHY.

(From "Maid of Athens.")

The sun of Athens pierced into my windows early next morning and would not let me sleep. It was the opening of October, and the sky was of a positively dazzling blue. I looked out of my window; the white houses of the long straight streets were almost painful to the sight because of the clear atmosphere that allowed full fierce play to the glare of the sun. Lifting my eyes just above the level of the highest housetops I see an object the sight of which sends a thrill through me. It is the Parthenon. I cannot see any part of the Acropolis on which it rests, the city and its houses come between me and hide the great rock of the citadel. Parthenon seems as though it rested on air. So clear and keen is the atmosphere that the pillars of the Parthenon appear to be within easy touch of my hand; and yet they are so far away that the divine temple looks almost as small as a child's toy.

The

The streets shone with a bewildering brightness when Steenie and I set out to have a look at Athens. Our hotel was in the street of Hermes; its windows at one side looked into the great square of the Constitution, where stands the royal palace, a huge barrack built of marble already yellowing under the keen influence of air and wind and sun. Those who do not know the city may be told that modern Athens is a town of white, straight, well-paved streets running at right angles with each other.

Every street which is not given up to shops is shaded by a double row of young trees, chiefly the pepper-trees, which after a shower of rain send about them such a pungent odor that the unthinking wayfarer finds himself compelled to sneeze as he passes. Intense activity, watchfulness, restlessness, chatter, are the characteristics of Athens. Everybody is brisk and stirring as if all his hopes in life depended on his moving quickly, gesticulating much, and talking at the top of his voice. They say Athens is not a city of Greeks at all in the true sense. Perhaps not ethnologically; no doubt the race has got a little mixed; but the Athens of to-day seems to me to bear a marvelous resemblance in its crowds and their manners to the Athens of Aristophanes and of Saint Paul. Nearly half the street population - the working, trading, donkey-driving, wood-chopping, load-carrying population are Albanians. The fustanella or white kilt of the traditional Albanian is as common in the streets of Athens as the private soldier's uniform in London. The servants and attendants of the royal household are always especially gorgeous in their Albanian garb. Their vast white kilts rustle with conscious grandeur like the tartans of Vichian-Vohr in "Waverley." Many of these heroes swagger about with belts that contain a whole armory of knives and pistols. Some of them wear shoes that turn up at the toes like those of a mediæval gallant, with the difference that the point of the toe is here adorned by a curious round ornament looking like a prickly pear or the bristly clump of an old-fashioned shaving-brush. Not

many women are in the streets. Athenian ladies seldom go out; Athenian maidservants do not run on errands. Epirotes are everywhere in great baggy blue trousers, the waste of material in which appears quite as extravagant as that of the white stuff in the fustanella. Shepherds from the mountains are there in shaggy capotes. Greek priests with mild deep eyes and long dark beards are everywhere, wearing gracefully their flowing robes and their high peculiar hats. Strings of donkeys bear along enormous piles of brushwood, every stack of brushwood covering each animal much more completely than Malcolm's soldiers could have been covered by Dunsinane boughs.

Who lingers long in the streets of Athens before he has climbed the Acropolis and seen the Parthenon? We soon left the houses and made for the sacred hill. We went the long way, past the street which bears the name of Byron, and past the amphitheater on some of whose marble benches you may still read the names of their once lucky possessors; and we mounted up by dusty roads made picturesque with the frequent cactus and thyme and even still some stray flowers, until we reached the hill of Mars, on which Paul preached.

A few sellers of curiosities waylay us as we mount, but they are not importunate; they are not like the pestering nuisances of Switzerland or Italy. We get to a belt of wall, and then to a gate at the top of a little flight of rugged stone steps, mere stones piled on stones, and when we knock the door is opened to us by one of the old soldiers who are the guardians of the place. We are within the precincts of

the Parthenon. The old soldier will accompany us if we wish it, and he will answer any question we please to put. But he does not insist on being our guide.

The Parthenon is perfection. Every pile that human hands have raised is for beauty and symmetry an anti-climax after the Parthenon. For hours one wanders lost in wonder through this wilderness of ruined temples and rows of stately erect columns and fallen statues, and slender broken shafts, and marble steps, and thrones and fonts, I have called it a wilderness, but the word will not suit; for the very divineness of order and harmony is in these ruins. Every prostrate column seems to have fallen with the dignity of the dying Cæsar. Then look around, turn your eyes a moment from the temples and the columns to the scene beyond, and say whether earth would have anything to show more fair even though there had never been a Parthenon and the Acropolis were a naked rock?

Nor is that part of the Acropolis the least interesting where you can sit or lean upon a low wall or battlement and see Athens shining beneath you. There spread out at your feet, like a colored map, is the whole city. You can trace every street, you can discover almost any house you happen to know. There is the king's palace; anyone can see that at a glance, with its great gardens and the square of the Constitution in front. There stretches the street of Hermes; see where it is crossed by the street of Eolus. Beneath in the valley is the temple of Theseus; one can hardly speak of it as a ruin, it is still almost untouched by time. Not far is the

Athenian terminus of the one Greek railway, the line from the city to Phalerum and the Piræus; we can see the little train come puffing and steaming in. In this marvelously still and clear air every sound from the city comes up to our ears softened but distinct. The cries of the eager sellers in the market, the wail of a child, the barking of a dog, the sound of a mule's bell, all come clearly up to the heights of the Acropolis. If you turn this way you see at the foot of Hymettus a burial-ground with its cypresses, and a funeral procession is going in, the corpse lying in the yet open coffin, adorned in all its gala clothes and with hands meekly composed upon its breast. Here and there you see what was once a Turkish mosque, with its peculiar round and cap-like roof; it is perhaps now an Athenian school-house.

Our country-whether bounded by the St. John's or the Sabine, or however otherwise bounded or described, and be the measurements more or less;still our country, to be cherished in all our hearts, to be defended by all our hands.

- ROBERT C. WINTHROP.