le, repeating it at the top of their
voices:

"'Robbers all at Parga!
Robbers all at Parga!'"

At Parga we met the Byronic legend, which from this point hangs over the
whole Ionian Sea. Parga is not far from the castle of Suli, and with the
word "Suliote" we are launched aloft into the resplendent realm of
Byron's poetry, which seems as beautiful and apparition-like as the
Oberland peaks viewed from Berne--shining cliffs, so celestially and
impossibly fair, far up in the sky. (We may note, however, in passing,
that these lofty limits are, after all, as real as a barn-yard, or as an
afternoon sewing society.) The country near Parga is described at length
in the second canto of "Childe Harold."

[Illustration: GALA COSTUME, CORFU]

The third island of the Ionian group is Santa Maura, the Leucadia of the
ancients. It looks like a chain of mountains set in the sea. Here there
are earthquakes, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu would have expressed
it. The story is that at Santa Maura and at Zante there is a severe
shock once in twenty years, and a "small roll" twice in every three
months. It is at least true that slight earthquakes are not uncommon,
and that the houses are built to resist them, with strong beams crossing
from side to side to hold the walls together, so that the interiors look
like the cabins of a ship. The rolling motion, when it comes, must make
this resemblance very vivid. The impression of Santa Maura which remains
in my own mind, however, does not concern itself with earthquakes,
unless, indeed, one means moral ones. I see a long, lofty promontory
ending in a silvery headland. I see it flushed with the rose-tints of
sunset, high above a violet sea. Of course I was looking for it; every
one looks for the rock from which dark Sappho flung herself in her
despair. But even without Sappho it is a striking cliff; it rises
perpendicularly from deep water, and it is so white that one fancies
that it must be visible even upon the darkest night. All day its
towering opaline crest serves as a beacon from afar. The temple of
Apollo which once crowned its summit can still be traced in sculptured
fragments, though there are no marble columns like those that gleam
across the waves from Sunium. "Leucadia's far-projecting rock of woe,"
Byron calls it. But it does not look woful. One fancies that exaltation
must flood the soul of the human creature who springs to meet Death from
such a place. The memory of the Gre