If the eye wandered towards the right from the road along which they were walking, it rested upon a wall glittering in the sun, which extended from the city to the rocky strand. Turning to the left, another wall of the same kind appeared, which fairly seemed to grow under the spectator’s gaze. Workmen were piling blocks of hewn stone one above another, and where the mass was finished, the noise of hammers beating the metal clamps into the stones, echoed for a long distance. This wall also extended to the sea, swept off in a wide curve, and joining the other, seemed to enclose the port and its buildings, above and below the city, in a protecting embrace. The eyes of the younger man rested searchingly, but with a satisfied expression, on this wall, whenever they turned a moment from the distant sail. At last, while gazing at the endless line of firmly united blocks, he turned to his companion, and said smiling: “If every persuasive word I have spoken to the Athenians in behalf of this work, could have become a stone, the completed structure would have stood before us long ago. But even as it is, we at last see the end approaching.” “And was this middle wall really indispensable?” asked the other, with a careless glance at the work. “It was. The old left wall turned much too far towards Phalerum. A large portion of the shore of the harbor was unprotected. The problem is now wholly solved. The city of Pallas Athena, brilliant and beautiful, sustained by the tributes of the Hellenic coasts and islands, has risen rejuvenated from the ashes of the Persian war, flung this girdle of stone about her limbs, and will soon be strong enough to defy the envious whose tongues utter the Greek language, no less than the assaults of all the barbarians of the East.” The man who thus addressed his companion was the son of Xanthippus, Pericles, the Alcmæonid, surnamed the Olympian. His friend was a famous sculptor in bronze and marble, named Phidias. The famous statue of Pallas Athena was the work of his hands. From the height of the Acropolis, it was visible throughout the Attic country, and even on the horizon, where approaching sailors joyously hailed the golden spear-head of the goddess, as the first token of the spell of “violet-wreathed Athens.” The long lines of stone blocks looked almost monotonous, but steeped in the light of the Greek sky, presented no aspect of gloom. An animated throng surged to and fro between them. The shouts of the mule-drivers echoed loudly on the air, and the richly-laden beasts moved in long trains along the road from city to harbor, and harbor to city. Here and there, close beside the way, grew a grove of olive-trees, whose green branches ever and anon swayed gently beneath the refreshing breeze blowing from the gulf.