A parrot-town, glaring and screeching; a monkey-town, gibbering, excited, inconsequent. All the shops, save the sweet-shops, were shut, and the inhabitants flooded into the streets. Not only had they decked their houses with flags, they had also decked themselves with ribbons, their women with white dresses, their children with bright bows, their carriages with paper streamers, their horses with sunbonnets. Bands of young men, straw-hatted, swept arm-in-arm down the pavements, adding to the din with mouth organs, mirlitons, and tin trumpets. The trams flaunted posters in the colours of the contending parties. Immense char-à-bancs, roofed over with brown holland and drawn by teams of mules, their harness hung with bells and red tassels, conveyed the voters to the polling-booths amid the cheers and imprecations of the crowd. Herakleion abandoned itself deliriously to political carnival. In the immense, darkened rooms of the houses on the _platia_, the richer Greeks idled, concealing their anxiety. It was tacitly considered beneath their dignity to show themselves in public during that day. They could but await the fruition or the failure of their activities during the preceding weeks. Heads of households were for the most part morose, absorbed in calculations and regrets. Old Christopoulos, looking more bleached than usual, wished he had been more generous. That secretaryship for Alexander.... In the great sala of his house he paced restlessly up and down, biting his finger nails, and playing on his fingers the tune of the many thousand drachmæ he might profitably have expended. The next election would not take place for five years. At the next election he would be a great deal more lavish. He had made the same resolution at every election during the past thirty years. In the background, respectful of his silence, themselves dwarfed and diminutive in the immense height of the room, little knots of his relatives and friends whispered together, stirring cups of tisane. Heads were very close together, glances at old Christopoulos very frequent. Visitors, isolated or in couples, strolled in unannounced and informally, stayed for a little, strolled away again. A perpetual movement of such circulation rippled through the houses in the _platia_ throughout the day, rumour assiduous in its wake. Fru Thyregod alone, with her fat, silly laugh, did her best wherever she went to lighten the funereal oppression of the atmosphere. The Greeks she visited were not grateful. Unlike the populace in the streets, they preferred taking their elections mournfully.