My greenwood was, as I have said, a cemetery. Heaven knows how long it had been there. The cypresses were enormously tall and thick and dark. And the stones under them--with their carved turbans and arabesques, and their holes and rain-hollows for restless or thirsty ghosts--were all gray and lichened with time, and pitched every which way between the coiling roots. You may think it a queer kind of place to sit around in, but it took my fancy enormously. I don't know--there was something so still and old about it, and the spring had such a look between the black trees. It wasn't quite still, either, for that strange, low minor of the water-wheels was always in your ears. It ran on and on, like the sound of the quiet and the sunshine and the cypresses and the ancient stones. And it made all sorts of things go through your head. I presume that first impression had something to do with it. You wondered whether the trees would have lived so long if so many dead people had not lain among their roots. You wondered--I don't know what you didn't wonder. As hot weather came on, I used to pack a hammock and reading and writing and cooking things on a donkey nearly every day, and drop down through the filberts to my cypresses. There was fairly decent bathing there, over an outrageous bottom of stones and sea-urchins. What I liked best, though, was simply to lie around and watch the world go by. Not that much of it does go by the Gulf of Nicomedia. If it hadn't been for a sail every now and then, you would have supposed that people had forgotten all about that little blue pocket of a firth leading nowhere between its antique hills. Then there were two or three trains a day, whose black you could just make out, crawling through the green of the opposite shore. And there was a steamer a day each way that it was as much as your life was worth to put your foot into. You wouldn't think so, though, to see the people who packed the decks. Sometimes I used to go down to the landing for the pleasure of the contrast they made, solemnly huddled up in their picturesque rags, with the noisy modern steamer. It was a miracle where so many of them came from and went to. That's the wildest part of the Marmora, you know, for all their railroad on the north shore. Some day, I suppose, when German expresses go thundering through to the Persian Gulf, it'll be all factory chimneys and summer hotels, like the rest of the world. But now there's nothing worse than vineyards and tobacco plantations. On the south coast there's hardly that. The hills stand up pretty straight out of the water, and they're wooded down to the rocks. You might think it virgin forest if you didn't know the Nicene Creed came out of it--to say nothing of invisible villages, and eyes looking out at you without your knowing. It all gave one such an idea of the extraordinary wreckage that has been left on the shores of that old Greek Sea. Only