Full of enthusiasm, the old poem stirring us to the very core, we wandered, Homer in hand, among the scenes made sacred for ever by the tale of the ten years’ siege. We looked out—as the homesick Greeks did—upon Imbros, Tenedos, Lemnos, Samothrace, and dimly saw far-away Athos; ahead of us was the glorious Ida range. Hardly a step could we take without treading upon broken marble and sherds of pottery, dumb witnesses of the vanished existence of a once teeming population, or probably three tiers of population—the men of King Priam’s time, the Romans, the Genoese. All have left their traces, all are now forgotten by the few poverty-stricken Turkish villagers who have ignorantly succeeded to their heritage. The Scamander, long since diverted from its old course, was peaceful enough when we first crossed it; but there came a great storm, the God descended into the river, and in a couple of hours the sluggish stream had become a wild, tearing flood; to get back was out of the question, and we had to take refuge for the night in a Turkish farm-house, a very filthy haven of rest, or rather no-rest, where we were the prey of creeping and hopping creatures innumerable. In the dead of the night the wind howled, the crazy house shook, and a portion of the ceiling plaster fell upon me, and began, as it seemed, to take unto itself legs and crawl all over me. Furious as the weather was, I jumped up and fled into an outside shed, where, after a bath by moonlight in Scamander, I waited for the dawn, which came at last, breaking into a glorious day, its beauty enhanced a hundredfold by the memory of the horrors of the night. As we sauntered over the hallowed plain, it needed no great play of the imagination to see the Grecian ships drawn up in line by the seashore; to picture to ourselves the hosts of Europe and Asia facing one another in battle array; to listen to the proud challenges of the leaders acclaimed by the shouts of their men; Ajax, “like the dread Ares in person, striding mightily, in his harness of flashing brass, shaking his long shafted spear;” to see the body of Hector being dragged in cruel revenge round yonder barrow, which is the tomb of Patroclus; to feel with the aged King Priam, praying for the ransom of his son’s remains; to mourn over the widowhood of Andromache! These are the very springs near which Hector was killed, still pouring their runlets of water into the natural basin at which the deep-bosomed Trojan women were wont to wash their linen.