But I could linger no longer in the contemplation of such fascinating scenes. The previous day I had made arrangements with a friend to take the steamer that very evening for Chanak Kalesi, on the Dardanelles. One of my long unrealized dreams had been to visit the site of ancient Troy. Several times I had been near it, but pressing engagements had always prevented me from gazing on the spot _Where stood old Troy, a venerable name,_ _Forever consecrated to deathless fame._ A few moments after our steamer left her moorings in the Golden Horn, she began to round Seraglio Point. Galata and Pera twinkle in the gathering gloom. The domes and minarets of Stamboul rise like dark, shadowy monsters above the somber groups of low, wooden houses by which they are surrounded. Broken stars quiver in the swift-flowing waters of the Bosphorus and, while we are still gazing at the venerable, ivy-mantled walls and towers that so long guarded the City of Constantine, we enter the Sea of Marmora--known to the ancients as the Propontis--the sea before the Pontus or the Euxine of which Herodotus says “there is not in the world any other sea so wonderful.” Early the following morning we were in the storied channel of the Thracian Hellespont--now more familiarly known as the Dardanelles. Like the Bosphorus, the Hellespont is replete with human and historic interest, and, as I contemplated its rugged cliffs, I recalled Lucan’s words that here _Each rock and every tree recording tales adorn._ This is particularly true of that section of the channel at Fort Nagara, formerly known as the Strait of Abydos. For it was _Here young Leander perished in the flood,_ _And here the tower of mournful Hero stood._ It was here that the venture-loving Byron swam across the Hellespont. And it was here that Xerxes spanned the Straits with the famous double bridge that enabled his vast army to cross over to the Thracian shore on his way to Greece, where “the barbarian despot sought to repress in the deadly bonds of Persian thralldom the intellect and the freedom of the world.” But the epoch-making victory of Salamis frustrated all his plans of conquest. Accompanied by his counted myriads the Persian invader, sure of his prey, entered Greece with all the wantonness and deadly hostility of barbaric pride; after his defeat by Themistocles, when army, fleet, and treasure were gone, he was forced to flee like the meanest fugitive. The Italian poet, Luigi Alemanni, tells in a single line the fate of the proud organizer of this widely heralded campaign when he writes: _More than a god he came, less than a man he fled._