‘’Tis only till to-morrow,’ said Alkibiades, introducing his friends. Eumanthes begged they would stay longer. ‘Our partridges are good, and our wine thought not the worst in Italy.’ ‘So have I often heard, and, indeed, I know it from my own experience,’ said the leader, who wore his most gorgeous purple robe, and looked ready to enjoy a long symposium after all the rough labours of his recent voyages. And a fine symposium it was. Eumanthes, after a little private talk with his old friend, had summoned the wisest of the Thurians to meet him. All the sage philosophers of Thurii came. Their philosophy did not prevent them doing justice to the feast. The daintiest fish of Thurii, cooked, some in boiling olive-oil, others in the white wine of the country, others stuffed with olives and wild thyme and baked—all were delicious. Boiled turkeys, each with a hundred of the famed Thurian oysters in them, and a boar’s head, with freshly discovered truffles, were followed by pheasants and young partridges, roasted and stewed in many ways, which made the chief guest declare that his own head cook Hymettos must come to Thurii to improve his art. But the snails, collected that afternoon from the vineyard of white grapes, made them, for a moment, forget all the rest; until a salad, with cray-fish, straight from the cool mountain streams, made them almost forget the snails. To the sound of silver flutes boys came in, bearing upon golden dishes the plump quails of Egypt, wrapped in the last young leaves of the maturing vines, and offered them upon bended knee to each guest, the virginal vine-leaves giving a new flavour to the Egyptian birds, which were sufficiently appetizing of themselves. The custom of the luxurious Thurians was to drink wine while the feast was being served, and not to wait till after the various dishes had been cleared away, as was the manner in the older country. Each course was served up with wines which had lain pining for the sunlight for more than twenty years. Cold white wine, which gave forth an aroma as of early summer mignonette when the tall, pointed amphoræ were opened, came with the fish and disappeared again until the salad. Red wine, clear and delicate, gentle as a maiden, gave flavour to the roasted venison. Red wines of bolder nature, larger-hearted, with perfume like the flower of the beech-tree on hot summer nights, added a fresh charm to partridges and pheasants. But all these wines were vanquished by their king of exquisitely fine bouquet, and of a vintage which the host admitted he had not seen himself since he was a youth in his dear old father’s lifetime. This monarch of all wine came with the fruit—figs bursting with ripe lusciousness, walnuts, and large bloomy grapes, with the warmth still on them of the setting sun.