That journey gave me a sight of one of the remarkable Cretan women, whose reputation for beauty I had always regarded, judging from the women in the cities, as a classical fable. I had been making a visit to the _mudir_ of the province through which we were passing, and, after pipes and coffee, and the usual ceremonies, I mounted my horse, and, at the head of my escort, rode out of the mudir's courtyard, when my eye was caught by the flutter of the robes of a woman in a garden across the road. Around the garden ran a high hedge of cactus, and as I leaned forward in my saddle to look through one of the openings, a girl's face presented itself to me at the other side of it, and we stared each other in the eyes for several seconds before she--a Mussulman girl--remembered that she must not be seen, when, wrapping her veil around her head, she flew to the house. The vision was of such a transcendent beauty as I had, and have since, never seen in flesh and blood,--a mindless face, but of such exquisite proportion, color, and sweetness of modeling, with eyes of such lustrous brown, that I did not lose the vivid image of it, or the ecstatic impression it produced, for several days; it seemed to be ineradicably impressed on the sensorium in the same manner as the ecstatic vision I have recorded of my wood-life. I suppose such beauty to be incompatible with any degree of mental activity or personal character, for the process of mental development carries with it a trace of struggle destructive to the supreme serenity and statuesque repose of the Cretan beauty. Pashley tells of a similar experience he had in the mountains of Sphakia, and he was impressed as I was.