Curiously enough, however, in spite of all this rapid and immense development, it is still to a great extent the Greek merchants who hold in their hands--even in our own time--the entire commerce and wealth of the old Phocæan city. A large Hellenic colony of recent importation still inhabits and exploits Marseilles. Among the richly-dressed crowd of southern ladies that throngs the Prado on a sunny afternoon in full season, no small proportion of the proudest and best equipped who loll back in their carriages were born at Athens or in the Ionic Archipelago. For even to this day, these modern Greeks hang together wonderfully with old Greek persistence. Their creed keeps them apart from the Catholic French, in whose midst they live, and trade, and thrive; for, of course, they are all members of the "Orthodox" Church, and they retain their orthodoxy in spite of the ocean of Latin Christianity which girds them round with its flood on every side. The Greek community, in fact, dwells apart, marries apart, worships apart, and thinks apart. The way the marriages, in particular, are most frequently managed, differs to a very curious extent from our notions of matrimonial proprieties. The system--as duly explained to me one day under the shady plane-trees of the Allées de Meilhan, in very choice modern Greek, by a Hellenic merchant of Marseilles, who himself had been "arranged for" in this very manner--is both simple and mercantile to the highest degree yet practised in any civilized country. It is "marriage by purchase" pure and simple; only here, instead of the husband buying the wife, it is the wife who practically buys the husband.