If you care at all for life in the open, if you have the love of camping in your blood, Greece will call to you at every moment to throw off the dullness of houses, to come and stay under blue heaven and be happy. Yet I suppose the season for all such joys was over when I was in Greece, for I never met any citizens of Athens taking their pleasure in the surrounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near any large town, when the weather is hot and fine, one may see cheerful parties of friends making merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or men dreaming idly in nooks that might have made old Omar’s delight, shaded, and sung to by a stream. In Greece it is not so. Once you are out in the country, you come upon no one but peasants, shepherds, goatherds, Gipsies, turkey-drivers, and, speaking generally, “sons of the soil.” [Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE, ISLAND OF ÆGINA PAINTED FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN] In the very height of summer, I am told, the Athenians do condescend to go to the pine-woods. They sleep during part of the day, and stay out of doors at night, often driving into the country, and eating under the trees or by the sea. But even in the heat of a rainless September, if I may judge by my own experience, they prefer Constitution Square and “the Dardanelles” to any more pastoral pleasures. I did not imitate them, but followed the Via Sacra one morning, past the oldest olive-tree in Greece, a small and corrugated veteran said to have been planted in the time of Pericles, to the Convent of Daphni, now fallen into a sort of poetic decay.