My last three visits to Thessaly have been made by bicycle. One gets over the ground more rapidly that way. For example, in February, 1900, Mr. Benjamin Powell and I rode from Trikkala to Larisa in two hours and thirty-seven minutes, including a short delay at the ferry over the Peneios. Baedeker puts this journey as "37 miles, 8 hours, carriage about 50 drachmas." We had time in the afternoon of the same day to go out to Tempe and back without trespassing much upon the evening. Sometimes, however, the tale is not so triumphant. In February, 1902, five of us were doing this same journey at a somewhat more gentle gait, and, just after remounting from the ferry, ran over some particularly dry and stiff Thessalian thistles, reducing about half of our tires to the condition of sieves in a few seconds. A long and pensive walk into Larisa was the penalty imposed on three of the party; and we took a carriage out to Tempe the next day. Sometimes one in travelling blunders into a good thing. Before the journey just mentioned I had several times passed Pharsala with just pause enough to take in the probable topography of the great battle between Cæsar and Pompey, and once only had I taken a rather hasty view of the walls of the acropolis. But this time, by the chance of two of our party lagging behind on the descent from Domoko, we missed a train that we might have taken to carry us a long way on toward Kalabaka. When I realized that we were compelled to pass the night at Pharsala, I expected to "pay of my person," inasmuch as we had no guest friend to fall back upon. What was my surprise to find a perfectly clean hotel opened only fourteen months before, bearing the name of the patriot poet, Rhegas Pheræos. We were in luck. But greater luck it was that we had a half-day to explore carefully the walls of the acropolis. Some parts of these are seen to be as old as those of Mycenæ. Some think that here was the home of Achilles. If this is so, he had a citadel that might vie with that of his chief. In the midst of our study of walls we were from time to time impelled to look up to majestic Olympus, and also to look into the deep cut between it and Ossa, the Vale of Tempe, through which Pompey, up to that time so fortunate, but then a broken man, fled precipitate to his doom. AN ASCENT OF THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN IN GREECE