In a large and hospitable monastery we found the well which Pausanias describes as close beside the shrine of the Graces, and here we partook of breakfast, attended by our muleteers, who always accompany their employer into the reception-room of his host, and look on at meat, ready to attend, and always joining if possible in the conversation at table. Some excellent specimens of old Greek pottery were shown us in the monastery, apparently, though not ostensibly, for sale, there being a law prohibiting the sale of antiquities to foreigners, or for exportation. In their chapel the monks pointed out to us some fragments of marble pillars, and one or two inscriptions—in which I was since informed that I might have found a real live digamma, if I had carefully examined them. The digamma is now common enough at Olympia and elsewhere. I saw it best, along with the _koph_, which is, I suppose, much rarer, in the splendid bronze plates containing Locrian inscriptions, which are in the possession of Mr. Taylor’s heirs at Corfu. These plates have been ably commented on, with facsimile drawings of the inscriptions, by a Greek writer, G. N. Ecnomides (Corfu, 1850, and Athens, 1869). It was on our way up the valley to Chæronea, along the rapid stream of the Kephissus, that we came, in a little deserted church, upon one of the most remarkable extant specimens of a peculiar epoch in Greek art. As usual, it was set up in the dark, and we were repeatedly obliged to entreat the natives to clear the door, through which alone we could obtain any light to see the work. It is a funeral _stele_, not unlike the celebrated _stele_ and its relief at Athens, which is inscribed as the _stele_ of Aristion, and dates from the time of the Persian wars. The work before us was inscribed as the work of Anxenor the Naxian—an artist otherwise unknown to us; but the style and finish are very remarkable, and more perfect than the _stele_ of Aristion. It is a relief carved on an upright slab of gray Bœotian marble—I should say about four feet in height—and representing a bearded man wrapped in a cloak, resting on a long stick propped under his arm,(103) with his legs awkwardly crossed, and offering a large grasshopper to a dog sitting before him. The hair and beard are conventionally curled, the whole effect being very like an Assyrian relief; but this is the case with all the older Greek sculpture, which may have started in Ionia by an impulse from the far east. The occurrence of the dog, a feature which strikes us frequently in the later Attic tombs, supports what I had long since inferred from stray hints in Greek literature, that dogs among the old Greeks, as well as the modern, were held in the highest esteem as the friends and companions of man. This curious monument of early Greek art was lying hidden in an obscure and out-of-the-way corner of Greece; isolated, too, and with little of antiquarian interest in its immediate neighborhood.(104) On my second