I confess we saw nothing of the foggy atmosphere so often brought up against the climate of Bœotia. And yet it was then, of course, more foggy than it had been of old, for then the lake Copais was drained, whereas in 1875 the old tunnels, cut, or rather enlarged, by the Minyæ, were choked, and thousands of acres of the richest land covered with marsh and lake. It was M. Trikoupi who promoted the plan of a French Company to drain the lake more completely than even the old _Catabothra_ had done, and, at the cost of less than one million sterling, to bring into permanent cultivation some thousands of acres—in fact, the largest and richest plain in all Greece. I asked him where he meant to find a population to till it, seeing that the present land was about ten times more than sufficient for the inhabitants. He told me that some Greek colonists, who had settled in the north, under the Turks or Servians (I forget which), were desirous of returning to enjoy the sweets of Hellenic liberty. It was proposed to give them the reclaimed tract. If these good people will reason from analogy, they will be slow to trust their fortunes to their old fellow-countrymen. So long as they are indigent they will be unmolested—_cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator_—but as soon as they prosper, or are supposed to prosper, we might have the affair of Laurium repeated. The natives might be up in arms against the strangers who had come to plunder the land of the wealth intended by nature for others. The Greek Parliament might be persuaded to make retrospective laws and restrictions, and probably all the more active and impatient spirits would leave a country where prosperity implied persecution, and where people only awake to the value of their possessions after they have sold them to others. What is now happening illustrates the views which I long since proposed. When the drainage works, completed in 1887, had uncovered rich tracts, the Government laid claim to every acre of it, and endeavored to fence off the old riparian proprietors. They on their side disputed the new boundaries, and claimed what the Government professed to have uncovered. Hence no sale to new owners is as yet possible. The dispute is still (1891) unsettled.