It was not bad taste for the King of Greece to put his gardens on the spot of the Gardens of Alkinoos. If I were King of Greece I would try to compound with my subjects to take the business of ruling off my hands and let me keep my Corfu home. It is no wonder that Elizabeth, the Empress of Austria, sought relief from her troubles in her villa on the other side of the inner harbor. When a part of the Venetian works was being removed in 1843, where the isthmus between the two old harbors joins the present city, there was found a circular monument about twenty feet in diameter, ending in a flat cone, and containing an inscription running almost around the layer of stones just below the coping. It reads thus: "This is the monument of Menekrates, son of Tlasias, of Œantheia by birth. The people erected it in his memory, "for he served them well as _proxenos_" (consul) "and he perished in the sea." This with more, making six hexameters, now much more obscured than when first discovered and copied, I made out by the help of a manual of epigraphy in the rays of the sun just rising over the mountains of Epirus. The archaic forms of the letters make it a remarkable inscription, which may be dated as far back as 600 B. C. As I read this inscription, a century older than the Persian war, and two centuries before Thucydides, I thought, here surely one is in contact with Greek antiquity. The next day, in an upper room of the building used for both library and high school, in company with the director, Professor Romanos, and Professor Papageorgios, a gentleman who deserves the title _philoxenos_, I read the other inscriptions of Corfu which have not been lost in the labyrinths of the British Museum or elsewhere. Some of these are of about the same age as that on the Menekrates monument, but very clear as well as exceedingly interesting on account of the old forms of the letters. They are mostly tomb inscriptions, telling of the grief which all the world has felt over the loss of the brave and the good. [Illustration: CORFU. MOUTH OF THE OLD HARBOR WITH "SHIP OF ULYSSES"] One need not linger too long over Kerkyra. It is a state which we cannot love. We cannot forget that before Salamis it held its fleet off the southern point of the Peloponnesus, waiting to see which way the great struggle was going to incline. When Athens concluded the alliance with her at the opening of the Peloponnesian war, many at Athens felt it to be an unholy alliance, and that the burden of hatred thus shouldered was almost a counterbalance to the winning of the second navy in Greece. Thucydides draws an awful picture of the decimating feuds, which seemed tinged with barbaric fury, between aristocracy and commons. In his pages the island vanishes from view bathed in blood.