bought drachmas enough to take us ashore, hoping for better terms on land.
I shall never forget that day at Pireus—heat and dust, flies and refugees. Could a more terrible combination be imagined? All along the quays lay these wretched folk, many of them fast asleep, with armies of flies crawling over them. If by chance one stumbled over a dusky body, which it was not easy to distinguish from the soil, a cloud of flies rose to smite you in the face—the most fatal of disease-carriers! The brown-faced women, dirtier even than the Neopolitans, now crowded round us, offering cakes and sweets from which they were every moment obliged to brush off thick coatings of flies, that once more struck one in the face or settled over my shoulders.
My Italian escort had, meanwhile, kindly procured a newspaper to act as fan, and now, hurriedly brushing away these horrible pests, he took a silk handkerchief out of his pocket to cover my neck. "What a magnificent husband you will make for someone," I said, smiling with gratitude; and he blushed with all the charm of his twenty-one years.
In another moment my eye fell on the hard brown faces and big "Jewish" noses of the moneylenders, forcing a smile as they call on you to "buy." They have very much the same expression as Southern Italians; keeping one eye, it would almost seem, to make a pleasant impression on possible purchasers, while the other betrays the keen and swift reckoning of profits to the uttermost farthing.
Seated behind little tables topped with boxes of glass, they are eagerly displaying their filthy paper money; haggling, arguing, smiling, and cheating you in one breath! Surely no type of humanity could carry us further from the heroes of our schoolday imaginings!
Wearied with fly-dodging, in fact, I had scant energy left for a "good bargain," over this "paper filth" for honest English sterling.
Sympathy now prompted me to ask the Italian Whether his eyes were not in pain; and, by the power
