These _panayíria_ are only a few of an inexhaustible list, for every church and spring has its own. I have not even mentioned certain famous ones that are not easily visited. Of this category, though less famous than the fairs of Darîja, Pyrgos, or Silivri, is the feast of the _Panayía Mavromolítissa_. This madonna in the church of Arnaout-kyöi is a black icon reputed to have been found in the fields at the mouth of the Black Sea. Every year on the 5th of September she is carried back in a cortège of fishing-boats—weeping, it is said—by priests and well-wishers who hold a picnic _panayíri_ in the vicinity of the Cyanean Rocks. I have not spoken, either, of Ascension Day, which it is proper to celebrate by taking your first sea bath. Or of St. John’s Day, known by its bonfires and divinations. The Greeks often burn in the fires of St. John one or two effigies which are said to represent Judas, though Herod and Salome should rather perish on that occasion. Then there is May Day, when young men and maidens get up early in the morning, as they do in Italy, and go out into the fields to sing, to dance, to drink milk, to pick flowers, and to make wreaths which the swain hangs up on the door-post of the lady of his heart. And equally characteristic, in a different way, are the days when men eat and drink in honour of their dead. No one, I suppose, tries any longer to prove that the modern Greek is one with his classic ancestor. Yet he remains curiously faithful to the customs of ancient Greece. Whereby he affords us an interesting glimpse into the processes of evolution. In him the antique and the modern world come together, and we see for ourselves, more clearly than on the alien soil of the West, how strangely habit is rooted in the heart of man, and how the forms of Christianity are those of the paganism that preceded it. XII FOUNTAINS