town quite satisfied our curiosity, I agreed
with a friend to trot over the classic ground
of Troy. The brother of our consul was an
old acquaintance and a local merchant; he
volunteered to go with us, taking his servant,
a young Jew, to look after our horses. On
Wednesday afternoon, therefore, we hired a
caique to take us to the village at the
entrance of the Dardanelles. There we proposed
to sleep. We had a very pleasant run down
with the current, and landed just outside the
outer castle of Asia in a sandy bay. That
was the bay in which the Greek galleys had
been drawn up at the siege of Troy, if ever
there was such a siege. If never, there was
one Homer made it real, and I believe in it
as steadily as in the death of Nelson. Close
by our landing-place was a pyramidal mound
of stones called the tomb of Achilles, and
there was another some two hundred yards
further inland, in which lie, or ought to lie,
the bones of Patroclus. As usual in such
cases, there is a dispute as to which tomb is
which, or whether the two friends were not
both buried in a single heap. We were not
disposed to vex ourselves with doubt; and as
we stood on the summit of the chief mound
with the Hellespont at our feet, we thought
of Hector's challenge to the Greeks, and his
promise that if he conquered the body of the
vanquished should be sent to their navy:—

"Green on the shore shall rise a monument;
Which when some future mariner surveys,
Wash'd by broad Hellespont's resounding seas,
Thus shall he say: A valiant Greek lies there,
By Hector slain, the mighty man of war;
The stone shall tell the vanquish'd hero's fame,
And distant ages learn the victor's name."

There rose up in our minds also other
associations, and we endeavoured vainly to
seize, while on the spot, the mysterious link by
which those plains are connected with the
Troy weight known to us in boyhood. The
sun was setting behind Imbros and
Samothrace, and throwing its last beams over the
plains of Troy; while in the distance Mount
Athos stood out sharply as a pyramid in the
western horizon. We saw with a proper
amount of feeling Tenedos laved by the
surges, and rocky Imbros break the rolling
wave. Between the two islands are ragged
islets, any one of which may have contained
the cave at which Neptune put up his
chariot when on his way to save the ships of
the Greeks from their assailants. I recollected
a severe caning that I had received when
young which had immediate connection with
that very incident. Jackals have grubbed
for themselves holes in the tomb of Achilles,
and nest there, just as commentators make
their nests now in the works of Homer; our
Jewish companion proposed that we should
smoke one out. Plenty of dry furze about
the place gave a practicable look to his
suggestion; but as we did not see wherein the
fun of the proceeding would consist, we
wandered on along the shores and thought
about the venerable Chryses, the bright
Chryseïs and other people of that set. Here,
we thought, where the peasant now sleeps in
his mud hut on a bed of rushes were the tents
of the Grecian host. The smoke of the fire
yonder which cooks somebody's meal let us
call fumes from the altars of Phoebus piled
with hecatombs of bulls and goats; or let us
imagine that it rises from the decks of burning
galleys. We undertook to suppose that
the hills were covered with the "lofty towers
of wide extended Troy." We supposed
ourselves to be favoured by the jackals and the
owls with echoes—or traditions preserved on
the spot—of ancient battle cries. The evening
breeze we proposed to consider heavy with
the souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain. In
the blue mist rising from the Hellespont, we
determined to see Thetis rising from her
crystal throne, and all her Nereids getting
up out of their pearly beds to follow the
unhappy mother up the Trojan strand. Not
until we had paid our debt to sentiment did
we allow ourselves to think of supper.

A walk of a few minutes past a multitude
of windmills brought us to a village of mud
huts at the top of the hill, built upon the
site of the ancient Sigeum. We made at
once for the house of a Greek known to our
friend Calvert, and sent down to the boat for
our luggage. Each of us had taken a large
blanket, a change of linen, and the necessaries
of the toilet; for all else we looked to fate.
The Greek gave us no reason to regret
our trustfulness. His house was one of the
largest in the village, built with walls of mud
dried in the sun, having outside stairs also
of mud, and an interior divided into two
stories by a wooden floor. The house roof
was of tiles. There was a large courtyard
surrounded by a mud wall, the resort of
oxen, goats, and geese, and fowls. There
were also some out-houses filled with chaff,
of which the flat roofs formed a terrace.
Upon that we took up our quarters, very
much preferring open air on a fine starlight
night in August, to close air and fleas. There
was a good supply of large fresh rushes,
which, when spread out, formed the best of
beds, or a chair or a couch, when heaped
together. On some fish just caught and
fried, some boiled eggs, and a most delicious
melon, we supped like Trojans before we
retired to our respective blankets, using stars
for night candles.

The clarions of innumerable Trojan cocks
awoke us before daylight, and we prepared
betimes for our day's march. The horses hired
the night before had, however, to be shod,
breakfast had to be eaten, and our blankets
packed upon an extra horse that was to be
ridden by a guide. We were not fairly off
till six o'clock. The plains of Troy were
then before us, and our first object was to
ride across them to the ruins of Alexandria
Troas. Round about the village, there were