Modern Athens is too arid to afford many public fountains, but women still draw water from the meagre spring Callirrhoë, on the edge of the Ilissus, not far from the Zeus columns. This spring, in name and situation, is still identified by some experts with the town-spring of primitive Athens and the later Nine Spouts. The traveller who throws in his fortunes with the archæological opposition must at least find in the lesser Callirrhoë the Athenian counterpart of the fountains which in so many of the towns and villages of Greece perpetuate, in usefulness and charm, an antique life of homely activities transmuted into poetry. The townspeople of Odysseus drew their water just outside the city from a wayside spring deep in an alder thicket, where a basin had been fashioned to catch the cold stream falling from a cliff. In the old days of peace, when the plain was safe, the wives and daughters of the men of Troy had washed the family clothes in broad stone troughs beside the two springs that fed the Scamander. Nausicaä of Phæacia and her maidens did the palace washing so far from the town that the occasion involved a day’s excursion and a generous lunch-basket packed by the Queen. But there was a spring of drinking water nearer, for, when Odysseus was entering the city, Athena met him in the form of a young girl carrying a pitcher. At Eleusis, also, in the royal age, the king’s fawnlike daughters, their crocus-yellow hair dancing on their shoulders, drew water for the palace in vessels of bronze from the Maiden Well. In classical Athens, as to-day, only the poorer women went for their own water, and perhaps it was after meeting one who looked tired and hopeless that Euripides made Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, given in marriage to a peasant in Argos to further her mother’s schemes, cry aloud to the night:— “O Night, dark foster-mother of the golden stars, Thy shelter folds me while this jar bows low my head As to and from the river-springs I come and go.” Only in the Panathenaic procession did the carrying of water-jars become ennobled. To-day a working girl may be seen in a pose suggesting that of the maidens of the Phidian frieze. [Illustration: AFTER POLYGNOTUS] [Illustration: THE PANATHENÆA CONTINUED] The folk-lore and customs of modern Greece, as heirs of the past, have been carefully scrutinized. Any knowledge that can be culled from special treatises will everywhere increase the traveller’s sense of historic continuity and will enrich his pleasure in meeting the country folk. But by means of only a modicum of Greek poetry he may discover for himself in Athens certain ancient beliefs and practices. On the first of March, associated like the May Day of colder climates with the blossoming of spring, bands of boys go about the streets carrying the wooden image of a bird, singing a carol which announces the arrival of the swallow, and begging gifts. One of these songs from Thessaly begins:—