One evening, when the food for supper was not enough, Mattina's mistress sent her out to the grocer's in the Piræus Road to buy some sardines; and while she was waiting to be served, she noticed four men sitting outside the shop around a little table. One of the men was strumming a guitar, and suddenly very softly they began to sing all together. They sang the "tsopanoulo," that song of the "shepherd boy" which Mattina had so often heard the young officers singing as they rowed themselves about the bay on moonlit nights "at home." She leaned against the door of the shop and closed her eyes very tight. "I will not look," she thought, "I will only listen, and it will be for a little as if I were back in my island." And because there is nothing like music to remind one of places, unless it be scent, a picture arose behind her closed eyelids, of the quiet dark water, of the broad golden path of the moon, and of the little boat that glided through the gold; and as she watched the picture, two tears trickled from the eyes that were shut, and ran down her cheeks. "Now, my girl," said a voice beside her suddenly, "here are your sardines!" and a greasy paper was thrust into her hand. Oh, how it hurt, to have to open her eyes, to take what was given to her, to pay her lepta, and to stumble out half dazed into the street. Once there, she thought for a moment that she was still dreaming, for on the side walk, talking to a man in a straw hat, was an old sea captain in the cross-over vest and the baggy blue breeches such as she had seen hundreds of times on the quay at home. "The wind has turned a little chilly," the man in the straw hat was saying, "and there are many clouds in the sky. It will rain I think before night." Mattina instinctively raised her eyes to the west, and half unconsciously repeated what she had so often heard her father say:-- "If but the Western sky be clear, Though East be black, you need not fear." then pointing with her finger where the sky was still of a dusky pink, she said, "There are no clouds there." The captain turned suddenly, and looked at the odd little figure in her white festooned apron that hung far below her frock, with her short black plaits tied round her head. "That is what we say in my country." Then stooping a little. "From where are you? Are you from Poros, perhaps?" Mattina gulped down a lump in her throat. "Yes, I am from Poros." "Whose are you?" "Aristoteli Dorri's, the sponge diver's." "Ah, yes! The poor one! I heard that he had died. And did your mother send you here?" "My mother wept much after my father died, and then she coughed more than she did before, and then she got worse, and then she died." And Mattina turned her back on the men, and twisted and untwisted the end of the paper in which the sardines were wrapped. "Now, lately?" asked the captain. "It was on the Thursday of the Great Week."