daylight, and can buy all the grapes they want for a trifle. The modern

inhabitants are confiscators and falsifiers of high repute, if gossip

speaks truly concerning them, and I freely believe it does.

Just as the earliest tinges of the dawn flushed the eastern sky and

turned the pillared Parthenon to a broken harp hung in the pearly

horizon, we closed our thirteenth mile of weary, round-about marching,

and emerged upon the sea-shore abreast the ships, with our usual escort

of fifteen hundred Piraean dogs howling at our heels. We hailed a boat

that was two or three hundred yards from shore, and discovered

in a moment that it was a police-boat on the lookout for any

quarantine-breakers that might chance to be abroad. So we dodged--we

were used to that by this time--and when the scouts reached the spot we

had so lately occupied, we were absent. They cruised along the shore,

but in the wrong direction, and shortly our own boat issued from the

gloom and took us aboard. They had heard our signal on the ship. We

rowed noiselessly away, and before the police-boat came in sight again,

we were safe at home once more.

Four more of our passengers were anxious to visit Athens, and started

half an hour after we returned; but they had not been ashore five minutes

till the police discovered and chased them so hotly that they barely

escaped to their boat again, and that was all. They pursued the

enterprise no further.

We set sail for Constantinople to-day, but some of us little care for

400

The Innocents Abroad