This journey, of scarcely eight hours, serves also to reveal a surprising amount of Greek territory. Taking it in the reverse direction, the train passes through Attica, Megara, the Isthmus and Argolis, and follows the entire northern coast line of Achæa. The mountains across the Corinthian Gulf include not only Helicon and Cithæron of Bœotia, and Parnassus of Phocis, but also unfamiliar peaks, barren of the Muses, belonging to Locris, Ætolia, and Acarnania. From Patras can be seen the low coast of the Ætolian bay on which lies Mesolonghi, the burial-place of Byron’s heart. Near it, although unseen from Patras, is Calydon, the scene of Meleager’s boar hunt, celebrated by Homer and Bacchylides, Euripides and Swinburne. Patras, the western seaport of Greece and surpassed in commercial importance only by Athens and Piræus, is in Achæa. The name of this province evokes Homeric memories only because it was settled by Achæans from Thessaly. Its chief contribution to Greek life lay in the “Achæan League” against Rome which, as Pausanias says, rose on the ruins of Greece “like a fresh shoot on a blasted and withered trunk.” Patras itself was unimportant until the time of Augustus, and its most valuable associations are with the early history of Christianity. In physical beauty, however, it is thoroughly Greek—“beautiful Patras,” Lucian called it, by way of contrast to the knavishness of one of its inhabitants. The epithet doubtless included not only the adornments added by the Roman emperors but also the natural charms of its situation. The fruitful plain, the height of Mount Voïdia in the background, the splendid waterfront facing the mountainous Ætolian coast combine to give a suitable welcome to Greece. This entrance is never fairer than in the hour when the silver gray of dawn is obliterated by the clear bloom in the sky that heralds the rising sun. The morning light reveals outlines in naked distinctness, and tinges all surfaces with a colour so fresh and buoyant that an immediate conviction arises of the joyous nobility of Greek scenery and of the youthfulness which a race so nurtured might maintain. The plain of Megara is separated from Attica by the Kerata and from the Isthmus by Mount Geraneia, a massive range extending across the Megarian territory from the Corinthian to the Saronic Gulf and interposing a rough and lofty bulwark between Central Greece and the Peloponnesus.