When we returned in the evening, Boothland--as I may now indeed call it, for Scheria has ceased to be--was one black smoking cinder. Hardly a tree or a recognizable rock remained to show that this had once been a peaceful home of men. The oracle, or prophecy of the old priest, had been horribly, though, of course, quite accidentally, fulfilled. * * * * * Little remains to be told. On my return home, I chanced to visit the British Museum, and there, much to my surprise, observed an old piece of stone, chipped with the characters, or letters, in use among the natives of Scheria. "Why," said I, reading the words aloud, "these are the characters which the natives employed on my island." "These?" said the worthy official who accompanied me. "Why, these are the most archaic Greek letters which have yet been discovered: inscriptions from beneath the lava beds of Santorin." "I can't help that," I said. "The Polynesians used them too; and you see I can read them easily, though I don't know Greek." I then told him the whole story of my connection with the island, and of the unfortunate results of the contact between these poor people and our superior modern civilization. I have rarely seen a man more affected by any recital than was the head of the classical department of the Museum by my artless narrative. When I described the sacrifice I saw on landing in the island, he exclaimed, "Great Heavens! the Attic Thargelia." He grew more and more excited as I went on, and producing a Greek book, "Pausanias," he showed me that the sacrifice of wild beasts was practised sixteen hundred years ago in honour of Artemis Elaphria. The killing of old Elatreus for entering the town hall reminded him of a custom in Achaea Pthiotis. When I had finished my tale, he burst out into violent and libellous language. "You have destroyed," he said, "with your miserable modern measles and Gardiner guns, the last remaining city of the ancient Greeks. The winds cast you on the shore of Phaeacia, the island sung by Homer; and, in your brutal ignorance, you never knew it. You have ruined a happy, harmless, and peaceful people, and deprived archaeology of an opportunity that can never, never return!" I do not know about archaeology, but as for "harmless and peaceful people," I leave it to my readers to say whether the islanders were anything of the sort. I learn that the Government has just refused to give the Museum a grant of five thousand pounds to be employed in what are called "Excavations in Ancient Phaeacia," diggings, that is, in Boothland. With so many darkened people still ignorant of our enlightened civilization, I think the grant would be a shameful waste of public money. {106} * * * * *