The cavalcade leaves Chorbati to make its way to Corinth by way of Nemea. Pausanias gives a choice of routes; the one chosen is that which he distinguishes as the τρητὸς, which he describes as narrow, but passable for carriages. Narrow enough it is, and well it deserves its name as a passage cleft through the rocks, but the wheel tracks are there to show that carriages did once go that way. We are between Corinth and Argos, not between Thebes and Delphi; but we can well fancy the difficulties and the likelihood of quarrel if Laios and Oidipous met in such a strait as this. We pass on, over ground which five-and-fifty years ago beheld one of the fiercest struggles of the War of Independence. Each of the passes, each of the heights, was held and stoutly contested in the August of 1822, when the men of Peloponnêsos beat back the Turkish host of Dramali in utter defeat. On our immediate path the ground rises and falls, but we are led over no special heights till, as we descend, the plain of Nemea breaks upon us. The columns rise in all the stateliness of solitude. Beyond rise the hills in which the ancients placed the cave of the Nemeian lion. This then is one of the seats of Pan-hellenic religion and Pan-hellenic festive gathering. If its glory did not reach that of Olympia or Delphi or even of the Isthmus, it is the first of the four to which our journey leads us, and we remember that Nemeian victories called forth the song of Pindar, and that Alkibiadês did not disdain either to win triumphs there, or to have those triumphs recorded in the choicest art of the sculpture of his day. There is the temple in the plain, a plain well fitted for the purposes of the games, and, cut out of one of the hills to the right as in the Larissa of Argos, we see where the theatre of Nemea once was. Though the place hardly ranks among sites of first-rate interest, though it calls up no such primæval associations as Mykênê which we have left, no such later associations as Corinth to which we are going, there is much to muse upon in the plain of Nemea. The legend of the lion comes home to us all the more strongly after seeing the sculptured forms which the world has agreed to call lions in the Mykênêan akropolis. Science and scholarship going hand in hand have given him a new interest. The lion, whose cave we cannot see, though we see the mountain side in which it is hollowed, may be mythical in his own person, but he is no mere creature of fiction. If, with Mr. Dawkins, we trace out the retreat of the lion from Europe, we see at Nemea one very important stage in his retreat. We trace him from the day when he made his lair in the caves of Mendip to the day when Herodotus so accurately marked out his geographical limits within the European continent. In his day the lion was still found in the region which stretched from the Achelôos to the Nestos; and when we look at the evidently careful nature of the