Greece, though sparsely inhabited, is in the main a very cheerful-looking country. The loneliness of much of it is not depressing, the bareness of much of it is not sad. I began to understand this on the day when I went to the plain of Marathon, which, fortunately, lies away from railroads. One must go there by carriage or motor or on horseback. The road is bad both for beasts and machinery, but it passes through country which is typical of Greece, and through which it would be foolish to go in haste. Go quietly to Marathon, spend two hours there, or more, and when you return in the evening to Athens you will have tasted a new joy. You will have lived for a little while in an exquisite pastoral--a pastoral through which, it is true, no pipes of Pan have fluted to you,--I heard little music in Greece,--but which has been full of that lightness, brightness, simplicity, and delicacy peculiar to Greece. The soil of the land is light, and, I believe, though Hellenes have told me that in this I am wrong, that the heart of the people is light. Certainly the heart of one traveler was as he made his way to Marathon along a white road thickly powdered with dust. [Illustration: From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood THE PLAIN OF MARATHON] Has not each land its representative tree? America has its maple, England its oak, France its poplar, Italy its olive, Turkey its cypress, Egypt its palm, and so on. The representative tree of Greece is the pine. I do not forget the wild olive, from which in past days the crowns were made, nor the fact that the guide-books say that in a Greek landscape the masses of color are usually formed by the silver-green olive-trees. It seemed to me, and it seems to me still in remembrance, that the lovely little pine is the most precious ornament of the Grecian scene. Marathon that day was a pastoral of yellow and blue, of pines and sea. On the way I passed through great olive-groves, in one of which long since some countrymen of mine were taken by brigands and carried away to be done to death. And there were mighty fig-trees, and mulberry-trees, and acres and acres of vines, with here and there an almost black cypress among them. But the pines, more yellow than green, and the bright blue sea made the picture that lives in my memory. [Illustration: From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF THE MYSTERIES AT ELEUSIS]