Miramar faded across the pale waters of the Adriatic, which lay like a dream at the foot of the hills where Triest seemed sleeping, all its activities stilled at the summons of peace. Beneath its tower the orange-colored sail of a fishing-boat caught the sunlight, and gleamed like some precious fabric, then faded, too, as the ship moved onward to the forgotten region of rocks and islands, of long, gray mountains, of little cities and ancient fortresses, of dim old churches, from whose campanile

What Greece is like in spring, I do not know, when rains have fallen, and round Athens the country is green, when the white dust perhaps does not whirl through Constitution Square and over the garden about the Zappeion, when the intensity of the sun is not fierce on the road to the bare Acropolis, and the guardians of the Parthenon, in their long coats the color of a dervish's hat, do not fall asleep in the patches of shade cast on the hot ground by Doric columns. I was there at the end of the s

Upon the southern slope of the Acropolis, beneath the limestone precipices and the great golden-brown walls above which the Parthenon shows its white summit, are many ruins; among them the Theater of Dionysus and the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, the rich Marathonian who spent much of his money in the beautification of Athens, and who taught rhetoric to two men who eventually became Roman emperors. The Theater of Dionysus, in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their dramas, is of ston

There are two ways of going from Athens to Delphi: by sea from the Piræus to Itea and thence by carriage; or by motor. Despite the rough surfaces of the roads and the terrors of dust, I chose the latter; and I was well rewarded. For the drive is a glorious one, though very long and fatiguing, and it enabled me to see a grand monument which many travelers miss—the Lion of Chæronea, which gazes across a vast plain in a solitary place between Thebes and Delphi. Leaving Athens early one morning, I f

Constantinople is beautiful and hateful. It fascinates and it repels. And it bewilders—how it bewilders! No other city that I have seen has so confused and distressed me. For days I could not release myself from the obsession of its angry tumult. Much of it seems to be in a perpetual rage, pushing, struggling, fighting, full of ugly determination to do—what? One does not know, one cannot even surmise what it desires, what is its aim, if, indeed, it has any aim. These masses of dark-eyed, suspici

Stamboul is wonderfully various. Compressed between two seas, it contains sharp, even brutal contrasts: of beauty and ugliness, grandeur and squalor, purity and filth, silence and uproar, the most delicate fascination and a fierceness that is barbaric. It can give you peace or a sword. The sword is sharp and cruel; the peace is profound and exquisite. Every day early I escaped from the uproar of Pera and sought in Stamboul a place of forgetfulness. There are many such places in the city and on i