pius his two sons started forth for Troy; through a country sacred in legend, eventful in history, fair to the eyesight.

For over an hour before reaching our destination the mountain range bounding the plain on the north could be seen to terminate abruptly in a series of detached rocks and burly mountain-spurs, rearing their bare and contorted heads above the valley bottom, where in a wide pebbly bed the Peneius furrowed his vagrant way. It was as though with a monstrous scalpel knife the mountain had at some time been flayed alive, and then with strokes of a Titan's axe gashes had been hewn in the excoriated mass, and portions of it detached from the remainder, the severed lumps upstanding in grotesque shapes of pinnacle and sugar loaf and columnar spire. At the foot of the principal cliff lies the trim little town of Kalambaka, the rock face, pitted and pocked with natural cavities, rising sheer behind it to a height of over 1500 feet above the plain. A little to the right stands an even more uncommon brotherhood of rocks, projecting to a great height like a cluster of megalithic and inconceivable boars' tusks from the plain; and on the summit of two of these cones could be seen outlined against the sky the tiled roofs and towers of Hagia Trias (Holy Trinity) and Hagios Stephanos (St. Stephen), the two nearest monasteries of Meteora. It was at the latter, as both the easiest of access and the most commodious, that we proposed to spend the two following nights.

Starting on foot from the station, and preceded

by an escort of soldiers and gendarmes, whose services, provided for us by the courtesy of M. Tricoupis, the Prime Minister of Greece, we began by regarding as superfluous, but ended by finding most useful, we left the town on our left, and commenced a circuitous climb around the eastern base of the rock that supports St. Stephen. For a little over an hour we continued the ascent through groves of white mulberries and plots laid out with vines, succeeded, as we rose, by dwarf oaks, cytisus, and hornbeam. The path was once a stone causeway, which had fallen to pieces. At length, rounding a corner at the top, we were suddenly confronted by the monastery walls pierced with miniature windows, and severed from us by a narrow but deep chasm, some eighteen feet across, over which was stretched a bridge. The insecurity of the old days, now gone by, was shown by an iron hook in the wall above the entrance, by which the drawbridge was once hauled up, and only lowered for trusty visitors. The modern structure was fixed and permanent. We entered the monastery, and in the absence of the Hegoumenos (Superior) were received by the venerable Father Sophronius, an elderly gentleman with grey beard and benevolent smile, who during our stay rendered us every possible attention, answered our irreproachable but to him unintelligible ancient Greek in still more irreproachable and to us equally unintelligible modern Greek, attended but declined to partake of our meals, and in every way comported himself as a meritorious disciple of St. Basil.