St. Charalambos is, however, the Æsculapius of modern days. He used to hold jurisdiction over the plague, and is represented as a hideous wizard, trampling under foot a serpent with smoke issuing out of its mouth; and in fever-stricken, marshy districts St. Charalambos still reigns supreme. In many places it is the custom on the outbreak of a pestilence for forty women to make a garment in one day, which is hung up in the saint’s church. For instance, at Zephyria, the mediæval capital of the island of Melos, which was abandoned altogether about twenty years ago as unfit to live in, I visited the ruins, and in the centre of them saw still standing the church of St. Charalambos, and an old man, who happened to be picking his olives there at the time, told me the history of the desolation, and the methods they used to resort to when he was young to rid the place of disease; how they used to bury heifers whole; and how they used to fasten up illnesses in a cauldron—that is to say, they wrote down the names of the various maladies on paper, and boiled them in a cauldron with some money and a cock in front of the shrine of the modern Æsculapius. But in vain; the town had to be abandoned, for it had been cursed by a priest, and never could hope to recover salubrity. It is a very common custom for Greek peasants to pass the night in a church of St. Charalambos with a view to cure an ailment; at festivals too, near miraculous _eikons_, such as the one at Tenos, the invalids pass whole nights in the church, reminding one forcibly of that ridiculous scene in Aristophanes (Plut. vv. 655) when the priests stole the food from the invalids who were asleep in the temple of Æsculapius, and we can easily see in this custom a mild form of the ancient ἐγκοίμησις when the sick folks lay down in the skin of a newly killed ram in the churches, and in this luxurious couch awaited the inspiration of the divinity. The quackeries and incantations common in Greece to-day as specifics for certain diseases are many of them very quaint, being long rhymes and formulas mixing up Christ, the Virgin, and saints with magic words and signs which savour of heathendom. It is the old women only who are supposed to know them, and they are very shy of producing them before a foreign unbeliever. They are just like those women who in ancient Athens practised quackery and secret cures, which were zealously guarded and kept up as specialities in families. Curiously enough these old women in Greece who profess to cure diseases will tell you, arguing from the analogy of plants, that all diseases are worms, which consume the body, and that they are generated by the wrath of the gods. They have arrived at the bacillus theory by much straighter reckoning than our physicians.