“All day long my thoughts kept reverting to this statue. It was so very life-like—so different from the stiff, ugly marble figures I had seen; and it was so much larger, too, standing nearly four feet high. Perhaps, thought I, the Panagía has put it here—perhaps it is a sacred miracle-working thing, such as the priests find in spots like this. And then suddenly I remembered how, when I was a boy, a great German _effendi_ had visited Sikinos, and was reported to have dug up and carried away with him priceless treasures. Is this statue worth anything? was the question which haunted me all day, and which I would have given ten years of my young life to solve. “When my day’s work was over, I put the statue on to my mule, and carefully covered it over, so that no one might see what I had found; for though I was hopelessly ignorant of what the value of my discovery might be, yet instinct prompted me to keep it to myself. It was dark when I reached the village, and I went straight to the store, sorely perplexed as to what to do with my treasure. There was no time to bury it, for I had met one of my brothers, who would tell them at home that I had returned; so in all haste I hid the cold white thing under the grain in the corner, trusting that no one would find it, and went home. I passed a wretched night, dreaming and restless by turns. Once I woke up in horror, and found it difficult to dispel the effects of a dream in which I had sold Kallirhoe to a prince, and married the statue by mistake. And next day my heart stood still when my father went down to the store with me, shoved his hand into the grain, and muttered that we must send it up to the mill to be ground. That very night I went out with a spade and buried my treasure deep in the ground under the straggling branches of our fig-tree, where I knew it would not be likely to be disturbed.” Nikola paused here for a while, stirred the embers with the little brass tweezers, the only diminutive irons required for so lilliputian a fire, sang snatches of nasal Greek music, so distasteful to a western ear, and joined his wife in muttering “winter!” “snow!” “storm!” and other less elegant invectives against the weather, which these islanders use when winter comes upon them for two or three days, and makes them shiver in their wretched unprotected houses; and they make no effort to protect themselves from it, for they know that in a few days the sun will shine again and dry them, their mud roofs will cease to leak, and nature will smile once more.