The Parliament Building is not at all grand. The Royal Palace is larger and considerably finer. At the head of a stairway is a good picture of Prometheus tortured by an eagle. The visitor is shown the war room, a large hall with war scenes painted on the walls and old flags standing in the corners. The throne room and reception room are both open to visitors, as is also the ball room, which seemed to be more elaborately ornamented than the throne room. There is a little park of orange and other trees before the palace, also a small fountain with a marble basin. The highest point about the city is the Lycabettus, a steep rock rising nine hundred and nineteen feet above the level of the sea, and crowned with a church building. From its summit a splendid view of the city, the mountains, and the ocean may be obtained. I spent five days in this city, the date of whose founding does not seem to be known. Pericles was one of the great men in the earlier history of the old city. He made a sacred enclosure of the Acropolis and placed there the masterpieces of Greece and other countries. The city is said to have had a population of three hundred thousand in his day, two-thirds of them being slaves. The names of Socrates, Demosthenes, and Lycurgus also belong to the list of great Athenians. In 1040 the Normans captured Piraeus, the seaport of Athens, and in 1455 the Turks, commanded by Omar, captured the city. The Acropolis was occupied by the Turks in 1826, but they surrendered the next year, and in 1839 Athens became the seat of government of the kingdom of Greece. With Athens, my sight-seeing on the continent ended. Other interesting and curious sights were seen besides those mentioned here. For instance, I had noticed a variety of fences. There were hedges, wire fences, fences of stone slabs set side by side, frail fences made of the stalks of some plant, and embryo fences of cactus growing along the railroad. In Italy, I saw many white oxen, a red ox being an exception that seems seldom to occur. I saw men hauling logs with oxen and a cart, the long timber being fastened beneath the axle of the cart and to the beam of the yoke. In Belgium, one may see horses worked three abreast and four tandem, and in Southern France they were shifting cars in one of the depots with a horse, and in France I also saw a man plowing with an ox and a horse hitched together. Now the time had come to enter the Turkish Empire, and owing to what I had previously heard of the Turk, I did not look forward to it with pleasure. CHAPTER III. ASIA MINOR AND SYRIA.