in them, and thus his instinct was justified. He was incapable of being bored for more than a couple of minutes together, and would have found something that could be commuted into cheerfulness in the trials of Job. Whether he liked a person or not, he always gave his best, not with the idea of making himself popular, but because that was the natural expression of his temperament. His amiability made the ripe plums easily drop for him, but when he had determined to get something which did not come off its stalk for the wishing, he had indomitable perseverance, and that rather rare gift of being able to sit down and think until a method clarified itself. With him, then, I struck up a friendship which dispensed with all the preliminaries of acquaintanceship: there was no gradual drawing together about it, it leaped into being, and there it remained, poised and effortless. Often during the ensuing years after he had left Athens and was at his post in some European capital, we did not meet for months together, but when the meeting came, relations were taken up again, owing to some flame-like quality in him which warmed you as soon as you got near him, without break or sense of there having been a break. Morning by morning he came down to the museum where I was studying sculpture with his paints and sketching-block, and made the most admirable pictures of some Greek head; we took excursions round Athens up Hymettus or Pentelicus, we usually dined together at some house of an evening, where he made cosmopolitan diplomatists act charades or play some childish and uproarious game. Best of all was it to leave Athens, and wander three or four days at a time in the Peloponnese. We cast pennies into the Styx, we lost our way and our mules and their drivers on the slopes of Cyllene, and were rescued by a priest who tucked up his skirts, and hurled huge stones at the savage shepherd-dogs; we slept in indescribable inns, where were all manner of beasts, we bathed in the Eurotas, and lay that night among goats in a shed on the Langarda Pass, and the sorriest surroundings were powerless to abate Regie’s enjoyment. And on one unique and memorable day we hunted for the temple at Bassae in a thick fog, and almost despaired of finding it, when out of the heart of the enshrouding mist there came the roar of a great wind that tore the fog into tatters, and lo, not a hundred yards away was the grave grey temple. The flying vapours vanished, chased like frightened sheep along steaming hillsides and through the valleys below, and all the Peloponnese swam into sight, from the Gulf of Corinth to the western sea, and from the west to the bays of the south, and from the south to the waters of Nauplia.... Did two more ecstatic pilgrims ever behold the shrine of Apollo?