not to be forgotten. The priests, with eye and hand and
gesture, expressed in lively pantomime to each other the effect
produced by each sentence, in what we should think a most
exaggerated way, like a chorus on the stage, but the effect was
most picturesque.

VISITS ATHENS

He attended a banquet one night, went to the theatre the next, where he
was greeted with lusty zetos, and at midnight embarked on the
_Terrible_ on his way to Athens. His stay in the immortal city only
lasted for three or four days, and I find no record of his impressions.
They were probably those of most travellers educated enough to feel the
spell of the Violet Crown. Illusions as to the eternal summer with which
poets have blessed the Isles of Greece vanished as they found deep snow
in the streets, icicles on the Acropolis, and snow-balling in the
Parthenon. He had a reception only a shade less cordial than if he were
Demosthenes come back. He dined with King Otho, and went to a _Te Deum_
in honour of the Queen's birthday. Finlay, the learned man who had more
of the true spirit of history than most historians then alive, took him
to a meeting of the legislature; he beheld some of the survivors of the
war of independence, and made friends with one valiant lover of freedom,
the veteran General Church. Though, thanks to the generosity of an
Englishman, they had a university of their own at Corfu, the Ionians
preferred to send their sons to Athens, and the Athenian students
immediately presented a memorial to Mr. Gladstone with the usual prayer
for union with the Hellenic kingdom. On the special object of his visit,
he came away from Athens with the impression that opinion in Greece was
much divided on the question of immediate union with the Ionian islands.
In truth his position had been a false one. Everybody was profoundly
deferential, but nobody was quite sure whether he had come to pave the
way for union, or to invite the Athenian government to check it, and
when Rangabe, the foreign minister, found him without credentials or
instructions, and staved off all discussion, Mr. Gladstone must have
felt that though he had seen one of the two or three most wondrous
historic sites on the globe, that was all.

IN ALBANIA

Of a jaunt to wilder scenes a letter of Mr. Arthur Gordon's gives a
pleasant glimpse:--

You will like an account of an expedition the whole part