We wrote our names in the King's visitors' book, and then spent a quarter of an hour inside the church. For many months our eyes had dwelt chiefly upon maimed and diseased bodies--desecrated shrines of the human spirit. Here, at last, was a shrine of the Greater Spirit, conceived and perfected with a true sense of religion--the noblest of the arts. The proportions of the church were beautiful, and a happy effect of ethereal atmosphere was produced by some windows of blue glass. But I wondered if we should not some day look back with curiosity on the custom of churches. We enclose a small space, within walls of marble, brick, or stone, and think that we entrap God. We are not far from the days of Moses and of the mercy seat for God's special use in the Jewish Ark of the Covenant, and we are, I'm afraid, very far from realisation of the vision of St. John, of the New Jerusalem, churchless, because the worship of God should be universal. The absence of cheap, ugly chairs and pews, interfering with the architectural lines, gives the interior of Greek churches an æsthetic advantage over Protestant churches, though the compulsion to stand is, for most people, probably a grievance. Man adopts more and more the crumpled, sitting posture, as though he were not happy at getting away from the ape attitude. But we had no time to spare for thought and sentiment; there never is time for such essentials of civilisation in these barbaric, anti-Christian days; and we were soon again on the high road, all thoughts centred on how we were going to persuade the car to leave a deep mud-hole, into which it had sunk, in the middle of the road. It ended in the visual way--ignominiously, with oxen. We had one narrow escape. We were deep in another mud-hole, when some peasants who had stopped to help us, remarked casually that a few hundred yards ahead of us, there was a bridge over a flooded stream, and that there was a big hole in the centre of the bridge. The warning was opportune, for the bridge was so narrow that there was barely room to pass, and the hole could not be avoided; only by emptying the car of passengers, and by the exercise of much care and skill was the bridge safely crossed. If we had come upon it unawares, a disaster must have occurred. But we arrived safely at Natalintzi. The village consisted of a picturesque street of one-storied houses, lined on both sides with acacia trees. We drove first to the café; here we met the Prefect, and then we all drank Turkish coffee, sitting round small tables on the pavement under the trees.