Then quite suddenly she said to me, “But Willie is mad!” I suppose I idiotically looked as if this was some joke, and she shook her outstretched hand at me, “I mean that he is mad,” she repeated. “Willie is mad.”... Then quite suddenly, with the arrested movement of a bird, wounded to death in mid-air, she ceased from her tragic flight, and came to earth. “If you are going to bathe again at Phaleron,” she said, with a laugh, alluding to an incident of the day before, “I must be sure there are no clothes on the beach, before I sit down to sketch. You came out of the water, and there was I....” Or the bugle sounded, and there was the unhappiest of the Czars looking very small beside his cousin Prince George. Or again, one afternoon, when, by perpetual permission, I was allowed to seek the shade and coolness of the palace gardens, I heard the trampling of foot-steps, and shrill expostulations, from behind a hedge of oleander. Round the corner came the originators of this disturbance.... King George seemed to have taken a dislike to his sister’s hat, and had plucked it from her head and was kicking it along the garden path, while she followed remonstrating. “But it’s an ugly hat,” said he, delighted to find some kind of umpire, “and therefore I took it and I kicked it, and she cannot wear it any more....” (Was there ever anything so like the immortal _Rose and the Ring_?) “My hat!” said the injured owner tersely, as she recovered her hopelessly damaged property.... “So rude of you, George.” My first spring in Greece was mostly spent out of Athens, for with another student I was put in charge of the British excavations at Megalopolis. All the plums had already been picked out of it, for the theatre had been completely cleared, and the excavation of the year before had laid bare the entire plan of the great Council hall, the Thersilion, built in the time of Epaminondas, so that this year excavation was equivalent to sitting on a wall while a lot of workmen removed tons of earth in which nothing could possibly be discovered. It was not thrilling, but at least one could incessantly talk to them in what purported to be modern Greek, until it became so. There had been considerable excitement about Megalopolis the year before, for the British excavators had thought they had triumphantly refuted the German theory, announced by Dr. Dörpfeld, that fourth century Greek theatres had no stage. They had unearthed steps and columns, which, they considered, proved the existence of a stage, and, rather prematurely, had announced their anti-German discovery in the _Hellenic Journal_ with something resembling a crow of satisfaction. On which this dreadful Dr. Dörpfeld came down from Athens with a note-book and a tape measure, and in a couple of hours in the pouring rain had proved quite conclusively, so that no further argument was possible, that the British, with a year to think about it, had quite misinterpreted [Illustration: E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 26 [Page 287]