But if this very expensive work might have been of great service when sailing-ships feared to round the notorious Cape of Malea, and when there was great trade from the Adriatic to the ports of Thessaly and Macedonia, surely all these advantages are now superseded. Steamers coming from the Straits of Messina would pay nothing to take the route of the Isthmus in preference to rounding the Morea, and the main line of traffic is no longer to the Northern Levant, but to Alexandria. Even goods despatched from Trieste or Venice may now be landed at Patras, and sent on by rail to Athens; so that the canal will now only serve the smallest fraction of the Levantine trade; and even then, if the charges be at all adequate to the labor, will be avoided by circumnavigation. Amid the promotion of many useful schemes of traffic, this undertaking seems to me to stand out by its want of common sense. Indeed, had it been really important at any date, we may be sure that the Hellenistic Sovrans or Roman capitalists would have carried it out. But in classical days their smaller ships seem to have been dragged across upon movable rollers by slaves without much difficulty. But we had already delayed too long upon this citadel, where we would have willingly spent a day or two at greater leisure. Our guide urged us to start on our long ride, which was not to terminate till we reached the town of Argos, some thirty miles over the mountains.(156) The country into which we passed was very different from any we had yet seen, and still it was intensely Greek. All the hills and valleys showed a very white, chalky soil, which actually glittered like snow where it was not covered with verdure or trees. Road, as usual, there was none; but all these hills and ravines, chequered with snowy white, were clothed with shining arbutus trees, and shrubs resembling dwarf holly. The purple and the white cistus, which is so readily mistaken for a wild rose,(157) were already out of blow, and showed but a rare blossom. Here and there was a plain or valley with great fields of thyme about the arbutus, and there were herds of goats wandering through the shrubs, and innumerable bees gathering honey from the thyme. The scene was precisely such as Theocritus describes in the uplands of Sicily; but in all our rides through that delightful island(158) we had never found the thyme and arbutus, the goats and bees, in such truly Theocritean perfection. We listened in vain for the shepherd’s pipe, and sought in vain for some Thyrsis beguiling his time with the oaten reed. It was almost noontide—noon, the hour of awe and mystery to the olden shepherd, when Pan slept his mid-day sleep,(159) and the wanton satyr was abroad, prowling for adventure through the silent woods; so that, in pagan days, we might have been afraid of the companionship of melody. But now the silence was not from dread of Pan’s displeasure, but that the sun’s fiercer heat had warned the shepherds to