On opening my window, I felt that I had attained one of the strange moments of life which can never be forgotten. The air was preternaturally clear and cold, and the sky beginning to glow faintly with the coming day. Straight before me, so close that it almost seemed within reach of voice, the giant Taygetus, which rises straight from the plain, stood up into the sky, its black and purple gradually brightening into crimson, and the cold blue-white of its snow warming into rose. There was a great feeling of peace and silence, and yet a vast diffusion of sound. From the whole plain, with all its homesteads and villages, myriads of cocks were proclaiming the advent of the dawn. I had never thought there were so many cocks in all the world. The ever-succeeding voices of these countless thousands kept up one continual wave of sound, such as I suppose could not be equalled anywhere else; and yet for all that, as I have said, there was a feeling of silence, a sense that no other living thing was abroad, an absolute stillness in the air, a deep sleep over the rest of nature. How long I stood there, and forgot my hurry, I know not, but starting up at last as the sun struck the mountain, I went down, and found below stairs another curious contrast. All over the coffee-room (if I may so dignify it) were the disordered remains of a disorderly revel, ashes and stains and fragments in disgusting confusion; and among them a solitary figure was mumbling prayers in the gloom to the image of a saint with a faint lamp burning before it. In the midst of the wrecks of dissipation was the earnestness of devotion, prayer in the place of ribaldry; perhaps, too, dead formalism in the place of coarse but real enjoyment. We left for Mistra before six in the morning, so escaping some of the parting inspection which the whole town was ready to bestow upon us. The way led us past many orchards, where oranges and lemons were growing in the richest profusion on great trees, as large as the cherry-trees in the Alps. The branches were bending with their load, and there was fruit tumbled into the grass, and studding the ground in careless plenty with its ruddy and pale gold. In these orchards, with their deep green masses of foliage, the nightingales sing all day, and we heard them out-carolling the homelier sounds of awakening husbandry. During all the many rides I have taken through Greece, no valley ever struck me with the sense of peace and wealth so much as that of Sparta.