We saw but little of the Isles of Greece. It was night and we were tired after a hard day; most of us, I think, turned in early. Now and then a light--a far tiny speck--appeared in one quarter or another--probably a signal beacon; that was all. But in the morning--it was soon after breakfast--a gray bank rose up out of the sea, and the word went round that it was Asia. That was a strange thing for a boy who had been brought up on the prairies of the Middle West--to look across the bow and see Asia coming up out of the sea. It brought back a small, one-room, white district schoolhouse, dropped down on the bleak, level prairie, and geography-class of three, standing in a row and singing to the tune of _Old Dan Tucker_ the rhymes of the continents: "Asia sixteen millions, The largest of the five grand divisions." It was not much of a rhyme, nor much of a tune, but there was a swing in the way we did it which fixed those facts for life. They came back now, and I had to get hold of myself a little to realize that this was the same Asia with all those square miles--the land of the Arabian Nights, of the apostles and the patriarchs--the wonderful country I had one day hoped to see. And presently we were off the Plains of Troy, passing near where the ships of the Greeks lay anchored, all of which seemed very wonderful, too, I thought. We were in the Dardanelles, then, following the path of those first Argonauts who set sail with Jason, and of that later band who set out in the _Quaker City_, forty-two years ago. No lack of history and tradition and old association here. But how one's information does go to seed; all of us knew something, but none of us knew much. Not one of us knew positively whether the Hellespont was the same as the Dardanelles or as the Bosporus, and when, with the help of the guide-book, we decided that it was the former, we fell into other luminous debates as to where Leander swam it when he was courting Hero and where Xerxes built his bridge. The captain said that both these things took place at Abydos, which he pointed out to us, and then we were in trouble right away again as to whether this was the Abydos of Lord Byron's poem, or merely another town by the same name. At all events it was not much of a place. On the whole, the shores of the Dardanelles are mostly barren and uninteresting, with small towns here and there and fortifications. At one place some men came out in a boat and went through the formality of letting us enter the country. It did not seem much of a permission; I could have given it myself. But I suppose we had to have theirs; otherwise they might have reached us with some kind of a gun.