resh water
they contained; my mother, too, longed for them; and one evening we
wandered home. What peace, what silence! We walked on through the
thick thyme, still fragrant though the sun had scorched its leaves.
Not a single herdsman did we meet, not one solitary hut did we pass.
Everything was quiet and deserted; but a shooting star announced that
in heaven there was yet life. I know not if the clear blue air gleamed
with light of its own, or if the radiance came from the stars; but we
could see the outlines of the mountains quite plainly. My mother
lighted a fire, roasted some roots she had brought with her, and I and
my little sister slept among the thyme, without fear of the ugly
Smidraki,[4] from whose throat fire spurts forth, or of the wolf and
jackal; for my mother sat beside us, and I considered her presence
protection enough for us.

We reached our old home; but the hut was a heap of ruins, and a new
one had to be built. A few women lent my mother their aid, and in a
few days walls were raised, and covered with a new roof of olive
branches. My mother made many bottle cases of bark and skins; I kept
the little flock of the priests,[5] and Anastasia and the little
tortoises were my playmates.

[Footnote 4: According to the Greek superstition, this is a monster
generated from the unopened entrails of slaughtered sheep, which are
thrown away in the fields.]

[Footnote 5: A peasant who can read often becomes a priest; he is then
called "very holy Sir," and the lower orders kiss the ground on which
he has stepped.]

Once we had a visit from our beloved Aphtanides, who said he had
greatly longed to see us, and who stayed with us two whole happy days.

A month afterwards he came again, and told us that he was going in a
ship to Corfu and Patras, but must bid us good-bye first; and he had
brought a large fish for our mother. He had a great deal to tell, not
only of the fishermen yonder in the Gulf of Lepanto, but also of
kings and heroes, who had once possessed Greece, just as the Turks
possess it now.

I have seen a bud on a rose-bush gradually unfold in days and weeks,
till it became a rose, and hung there in its beauty, before I was
aware how large and beautiful and red it had become; and the same
thing I now saw in Anastasia. She was now a beautiful grown girl, and
I had become a stout stripling. The wolf-skins that covered my
mother's and Anastasia's bed, I had myself taken from wolves that had
fallen be