-black; the vintage takes place
in August. It is not a hardy vine. It attains luxuriance, I was told,
only in Greece; and even there it is restricted to the northern
Peloponnesus, the shores of the Gulf of Corinth, and the Ionian Islands.
M. About, confronted with the 195,000,000 pounds of currants which were
exported in 1876, dipped his French pen afresh, and wrote: "Plum-pudding
and plum-cake are typical pleasures of the English nation, pleasures
whose charms the Gaul cannot appreciate." He adds that if other
countries should in time be converted to "these two pure delights,"
Greece would not need to cultivate anything else; she would become rich
"enormement."

Zante is the sixth of the islands, and as the steamer leaves her, still
smiling gayly over her dimpling bay, it seems proper to cast at least
one thought in the direction of the seventh sister, upon whom we are now
turning our backs. For "We are seven" the islands declare as
persistently as the little cottage girl, though the seventh has gone
away, if not to heaven, at least to the very end of the Peloponnesus.
Why Cerigo should have been included in the Ionian group I do not know;
it lies off the southernmost point of Greece, near Cape Malea, and might
more reasonably be classed with the Cyclades, or with Crete. Birthplace
of Aphrodite, Cythera of the ancients, though it is, I have never met
any one who has landed there in actual fact (I do not include dreams).
People going by sea to Athens from Naples, or from Brindisi, pass it in
their course, and if they read their Murray or their Baedeker, to say
nothing of other literature, no doubt their thoughts dwell upon the
goddess of love for a moment as they pass her favorite shore. A
photograph of the minds of travellers, as their eyes rest upon this
celebrated isle, would be interesting. To mention (with due respect)
typical names only, what would be the vision of Mr. Herbert Spencer, or
of Prince Bismarck? of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or of Ibsen? of
General Booth, Tolstoi, or Miss Yonge? We can each of us think of a list
which would rouse our curiosity in an acute degree. To come down to an
unexciting level, I know what the apparition in my own mind would
be--that picture in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence: Botticelli's "Birth
of Venus." I should inevitably behold the fifteenth-century goddess
coming over the waves in her very small shell; I should see her high
cheek-bones, her sad eyes, her discontented mou