The next morning a steep and picturesque path over Mount Parthenion--the same path, I suppose, on which Phidippides had his well-known interview with the god Pan--brought us to Arcadia. And at the name of Arcadia let not the fond mind revert to scenes of pastoral innocence and enjoyment, such as poets and artists love to paint--a lawn of ever-fresh verdure shaded by the sturdy oak and wide-spreading beech, watered by never-failing springs, swains and maidens innocent as the sheep they tend, dancing on the green sward to the music of the pipe, and snowy mountains in the distance lending repose and majesty to the scene. Nothing of this picture is realized by the Arcadia of to-day, but the snowy mountains, and they, indeed, are all around and near. No, let your dream of Arcadia he something like this: A bare, open plain, three thousand feet above the level of the sea, fenced in on every side by snow-topped mountains, and swept incessantly by cold winds, the sky heavy with clouds, the ground sown with numberless stones, with here and there a bunch of hungry-looking grass pushing itself feebly up among them. Not a tree do you behold, hardly a shrub. You come to a river--it is a broad, waterless bed of cobble-stones and gravel, only differing from the dry land in being less mixed with dirt, and wholly, instead of partly, destitute of vegetation. But your eye falls at last on a sheet of water--there is surely a placid lake giving beauty and fertility to its neighborhood. No, it is a _katavothron_, or chasm, in which the accumulated waters of the plain disappear. For as these Arcadian valleys are so shut in by mountains as to leave no natural egress to the water, it gathers in the lowest spot it can reach, and there stagnates, unless it can wear a passage for itself, or find a subterraneous channel through the limestone mountain, and come to light again in a lower valley. Such a reäppearance we saw near Argos, a broad, swift stream--the Erasmus--rushing from under a mountain with such force as to turn mills; it is believed to come from a _kalavothron_ in the northern part of Arcadia. And not far from thence a fountain of fresh water bubbles up in the sea a few yards from the shore; this is traced to a similar source. In some parts of Greece the remains may still be seen of the subterranean channels by which in ancient times the _katavothra_ were kept clear, and thus prevented from overflowing. In this way much land was artificially redeemed to agriculture.