ship.

The ride (or walk, which I recommend, in preference, to good
pedestrians) is a delightful one in early summer; and, even after the
heats of August have browned the plain of the Akroteri, an early start
from Canea will leave a memory of breezy upland with wide expanse of
mountain and sea,--including some of the most picturesque views to be
found in Crete,--and of the rich odors of many aromatic herbs and
flowers, through whose rifled sweets the Akroteri is famous for its
honey. A three hours' ride--first up the zigzag road that climbs the
ridge above Kalepa, and then over an undulating plain sparsely dotted
with hamlets and clouded here and there with olive-orchards--brings one,
with a sufficient appreciation of good cheer, and clean, cool rooms,
shade, and quiet, into the cloistered court of Hagia Triada, a
semi-military building of the Venetian days. Still unfinished, the
Turkish conquest having interrupted its progress, with all other in the
seventeenth century. In the centre of the quadrangle, round which are
the rooms of the monks and the guest-rooms, stands the church, an
edifice nondescript as to style, with a facade of a species of Venetian
Doric, fronting a building whose plan is a Latin cross, and whose roof
observes Byzantine tradition. On the entablature over the doorway are
the dedicatory Greek capitals, [Greek: BGYTHTP],--the meaning of which
none of the priests could tell me, though a duplicate inscription in
Latin and Greek beside the door told by whom the convent was built; and
the Hegoumenos added the tradition, that the two founders, being
converted by an extraordinary illumination from the Latin to the Greek
Church, gave an edifying proof of their devotion to their new creed by
erecting this convent.

The Hegoumenos was a Sphakiote, a very shrewd, clear-headed and
energetic man, and, though betraying no great familiarity with books or
dogmas, showed that he was a better fisher in those waters where men are
to be caught than most of his _confreres_ of any creed. He had that
manner of innate authority which never fails to impose itself on the
indecisions and self-distrusts of the mass of men, and which in a wider
circle of ambition would certainly have won him a larger place. Like the
Hegoumenos of every other Greek convent, he was elected by the monks,
and, though completely in the hands of his brethren, and at any time
liable to be removed by another election, the subordination to him was
per