“The old man asked, with the most lively interest, and even with a certain anxiety, about an ancient temple, which, he said, had been of old the grandest in all Greece. None of his hearers recognised the name,, which he pronounced with tender emotion. At last,, when he had minutely described the place where this, monument stood, a young seaman suddenly recognised the spot. ‘The village where I was born,’ he exclaimed, ‘is situated precisely there. During my childhood I have long watched there the pigs of my father. On this site there are, in fact, the ruins of very ancient constructions, which must have been incredibly magnificent. Here and there you see some columns still erect; they are isolated or connected by fragments of roofing, whence hang tendrils of honeysuckle and red bind-weeds. Other columns, some of them red marble, lie fractured on the grass. The ivy has invaded their superb capitals, formed of flowers and foliage delicately chiselled. Great slabs of marble, squared fragments of wall and triangular pieces of roofing, are scattered about, half-buried in the earth. I have often, continued the young man, ‘passed hours at a time in examining the combats and the games, the dances and the processions, the beautiful and ludicrous figures which are sculptured there. Unfortunately these sculptures are much injured by time, and are covered with moss and creepers. My father, whom I once asked what these ruins were, told me that they were the remnants of an ancient temple, of old inhabited by a Pagan God, who not only indulged in the most gross debaucheries, but who was, moreover, guilty of incest and other infamous vices; that in their blindness the idolators had, nevertheless, immolated oxen, often by hundreds, at the foot of his altar. My father assured me that we still saw the marble basin wherein they had gathered the blood of the victims, and that it was precisely the trough to which I frequently led my swine to drink the rain-water, and in which I also preserved the refuse which my animals devoured with so much appetite.’