Not very long after we were clear of the town we passed not far from
the village of “Louis,” who won the first Marathon race that was run
under King George’s scepter, Marousi, where the delicious water is
found that Athens loves to drink. And then away we went through the
groves and the little villages, where dusty soldiers were buying up
mules for the coming war; and Greek priests were reading newspapers;
and olive-skinned children, with bright, yet not ungentle, eyes, were
coming from school; and outside of ramshackle cafés, a huddle of
wood, a vine, a couple of tables, and a few bottles, old gentlemen,
some of them in native dress, with the white fustanelle, a sort of
short skirt not reaching to the knees, and shoes with turned-up toes
ornamented with big black tassels, were busily talking politics. Carts,
not covered with absurd but lively pictures, as they are in Sicily,
lumbered by in the dust. Peasants, sitting sidewise with dangling feet,
met us on trotting donkeys. Now and then a white dog dashed out, or
a flock of thin turkeys gobbled and stretched their necks nervously
as they gave us passage. Women, with rather dingy handkerchiefs tied
over their heads, were working in the vineyards or washing clothes
here and there beside thin runlets of water. Two German beggars, with
matted hair uncovered to the sun, red faces, and fingers with nails
like the claws of birds, tramped by, going to Athens. And farther on we
met a few Turkish Gipsies, swarthy and full of a lively malice, whose
tents were visible on a hillside at a little distance, in the midst of
a grove of pines. All the country smiled at us in the sunshine. One
jovial man in a fustanelle leaned down from a cart as we passed, and
shouted in Greek: “Enjoy yourselves! Enjoy yourselves!” And the gentle
hills, the olive-and pine-groves, the stretching vineyards, seemed to
echo his cry.
[Illustration: Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson