a way I never saw before nor since. Like the goats, from whom
this sea is said to have been named, we leaped from the summit of one
wave to that of the next, and seemed hardly to touch the water. We had
up a small sail, and we sat still and steady at the bottom of the
vessel. Never had I conceived the possibility of a boat scampering along
before the wind at such a rate as this. My man crossed himself. I looked
up at the old pilot, but he went on quietly smoking his pipe with his
finger on the bowl to keep the ashes from being blown away. It was a
marvel to me with what exactness he touched the helm just at the right
instant, for it seemed as if we had sixty narrow escapes every minute,
but the old man did not stir an inch. Gallantly we dashed, and skipped,
and bounded along. What a famous lively little boat it was, yet it was
carved and gilt and as pretty as anything could be! We were soon running
down the west coast of Lemnos, where the surf was lashing the precipice
in fury with an angry roar that resounded far out to sea: then of a
sudden we rounded a sharp point and shot into such smooth water so
instantaneously that one could scarcely believe that the blue waves of
the Holy Sea, [Greek: Agios pelagos], as the Greeks call
it still, could be the same as the furious and frenzied ocean out of
which we had darted like an arrow from a bow.

We had a long row in the hot sun along the sheltered coast till we
landed at a rotten wooden pier before the chief city or rather the dirty
village of the Lemnians. I had a letter to a gentleman who was sent by a
merchant of Constantinople to collect wool upon this island; so to him I
bent my way, hooted at by some Lemnian women, the worthy descendants
probably of those fair dames who have gained a disagreeable immortality
by murdering their husbands. Here it was that Vulcan broke his leg, and
no wonder, for a more barren, rocky place no one could have been kicked
down into. My friend of the woolpacks, who was a Frenchman, was very
kind and civil, only he had nothing to offer me beyond the bare house,
like the consul's Jew at the Dardanelles, so I walked about and looked
at nothing, which was all there was to see, whilst my servant hired a
little square-rigged brig to take me next day to Mount Athos.

After dinner I made inquiries of my host what he had in the way of bed.
His answer was specific. There was no bed, no mattress, no divan; sheets
were unknown things, and the wool he did