As we entered the bay of Hagia Eirene of Thermiá we thought we had never visited a more dreary, inhospitable shore. Not even had we the mountains jutting boldly into the sea, as they do in all the other Cyclades, to relieve Thermiá from its ugliness. It is treeless, too, and flat, except at the northern point. As our boat drew near the shore we witnessed a touching scene — the departure of a young Kythniote to try his fortunes in the outer world. His relatives were there to bid him farewell, giving way to those extravagances of grief so dear to the heart of a Greek; not until the last whistle of the departing steamer did he tear himself away, and was rowed, amidst sobs and groans, to the vessel. They explained to us what a solemn affair departure for foreign parts is considered here in Kythnos: quite a ceremony is gone through. All his friends and relatives meet to bid him farewell, and as he crosses the threshold of his home one of the household pours out of a glass a libation of water to the gods, which is supposed to ensure abundance and success. Then the farewells begin: the least intimate embrace him at his door, others accompany him part of the way, only his near relatives go all the way to the harbour, and none of them wish him a speedy return, for it would be a bad omen.

Some of these long absences (zontaná apochorísmata ^gr) on the part of the males are made very trying for the women left behind; it is considered for them as a season of mourning: all the smart antimacassars are removed from the sofas, all ornaments must be put away, and the wife is expected to pass the time in genuine widowhood until her husband’s return. She must not dance, she must not be seen at feasts, and her visits must be restricted to her nearest relatives. And the return (nosteía ^gr) is quite as joyful a ceremony as the other is mournful, though, to the detriment of Kythnos, it is of far rarer occurrence. On the first days after the wanderer’s return friends and relatives pour in with presents of food and congratulations, and the wife can indulge once more in the pomps and vanities of the world.

‘If your eyes water,’ say the Kythniotes, ‘you will see a friend from afar; if your left hand itches it will be a letter; if the right, money,’ and, true Greeks as they are, the itching of the right hand is by far the favourite symptom. There is a wretched wineshop down at the port of Hagia Eirene, where we waited till our mules could come from Messariá, the capital of our new realm. It was a dirty, repulsive hole, kept by a half-clad old woman and her daughter, who looked at us with greedy eyes, as if their right hands had been itching when the steamer came in, and that we were to fulfil the prophecy. As we relieved our hunger with some cold fish and bad wine, something really did itch with a vengeance, for the daughter was called upon to search her mother’s matted hair; and she searched, too, with evident success — an appetising sight for us! Yet even in this abode of filth a structure called a bed in one corner had a beautiful bit of old Greek lace as an ornament to its sheet.

As the mules were long in coming we took a boat and went to visit the bathing establishment of Thermiá, from which the modern name of the island is derived, though since the revival of Hellenism it has become the fashion to call it Kythnos, as of old. It is a large, uninteresting bathhouse, German in character, for it was built during King Otho’s reign under the direction of a German doctor; it contains the hot springs, and offers accommodation for over a hundred guests, who come here in the summer time for the baths. In remote antiquity Kythnos is never alluded to as a bath resort, and never rivalled Aedipsus, though it is just as easy of access, and the waters are stronger. It is probable that the source was unknown to the ancients, and that the waters first disclosed themselves after an eruption of Mount Sorus, a now extinct volcanic hole on the hill behind. Kythniote shepherds say that when they lose a beast down this hole it will be cast out again close to the baths. There are traces of Roman remains, however, and tombs near the baths, and Rome had a good deal to say to Kythnos in the days when the false Nero set himself up here and overran the Aegean Sea with his piracies. As far back as 1142 A.D. the island is mentioned as Thermiá, so that the hot baths are now of considerable antiquity.

But not till 1782 did they build a bathing house here, and this was done by the instrumentality of the great Mavrojenes of Paros, who was hospodar of Wallachia. But the people of the island flatly refused to use the waters; they were far too superstitious, and said that the warm springs were haunted by Nereids, and that the devils of Hades worked below. Even now a Kythniote peasant is afraid of them, and tells you that Charon has his garden below here, where he plants young men and women and small children instead of flowers; but yet a Kythniote has great respect for his baths and the new establishment, for they bring money and strangers to his island.

It is certainly a dreary spot to go to for a cure; not a tree near, and a hideous waste of sand, impregnated with mineral water, between the bathhouse and the sea; rheumatism for life would be preferable to a month of the burning summer spent here.

The town of Messariá, as its name implies, is in the middle of the island: it is a long, narrow, uninteresting white place, running along a low ridge, with two or three windmills behind it to break the monotony of the view. The inhabitants looked uninteresting: they wore none of those pretty costumes which Ross saw forty years ago, for they told me that a Jew had visited Kythnos two or three years ago, and had bought up every costume and every scrap of embroidery in the place.

‘Then does no one wear the costumes now?’ I asked of the demarch; whereat he consulted his wife, and replied that the old woman up at one of the mills, who was the last to wear the old dress, had died a few months ago, but that his brother, the doctor, had a doll for his children, dressed in detail as a Kythniote; and this doll was brought me for inspection. The costume must have been chiefly remarkable for its puffed out sleeves, short skirt, and trousers, fastened like knickerbockers under the knees, reminding one of a divided skirt. I was grateful for seeing this doll, and annoyed at the Jew; but, though he could buy up their costumes, he could not buy their customs, which remain firmly rooted in Kythnos, despite the numerous bath guests and the steamer which comes from Athens once a fortnight, and despite our host, Demarch Bastas, who is one of those reforming demarchs, like our host at Pholygandros. He had been at Alexandria, where he made money, and now recognises how far behind the rest of the world his island is in civilisation.

I never had so much difficulty in going through the necessary compliments of admiration as when the demarch took us over his town. Nothing will grow near it, for it is exposed to every wind, having no sheltering mountains around it; and I could not divine why such a spot could ever have been chosen for a town until I heard the legend that on the fall of the old mediaeval town into the hands of the Turks an archon ^note had fled towards the south, and his horse, wearied with the rapidity of his flight, stumbled down here: so the archon recognised it as his duty to build on this spot, and gather round the Church of the Holy Trinity the nucleus of a new town.

Kythnos offers a good illustration of the vicissitudes of a one-citied island. First, there are the ruins of the old Grecian town in a charming nook on the western coast; this was inhabited in the Roman days, but deserted before the introduction of Christianity. Then there is the severe Frankish town, built on a beetling cliff to the north of the island, where, says the local tradition, ‘on Easter Day, three hundred years ago, the Turks took it from the Franks, and a great slaughter took place, so that the sea was red, and the redness thereof reached even to Zea (Keos).’ Close by they still point out a red spot on the rocks, which, they say, was made by this dread slaughter; and if you ask your muleteer he will sing you the Thermiote’s favourite song about the mighty robber who placed a chain in the sea from Thermiá to Zea, and took many ships in his toils, so that his riches were innumerable. The conclusion of this saga, relating the capture of the fortress by the Turks, is quite Homeric in style, and runs as follows:—

So Thermiá’s history is chiefly written in her ruins and her sagas. Messariá was probably founded by one of the Frankish lords in the sixteenth century, the Gozzadini being the family who ruled it as an appanage of the Naxiote duchy; and over the Church of St. Sabbas we find the initials of one of that lordly house.

Another episode in the history of Thermiá, now told only by tradition, is the colonisation of the island by Cretans during the war which raged for the possession of Crete between Turks and Venetians. A legend says that another church at Messariá was built by an honest Kythniote under the following circumstances. A Cretan refugee entrusted a lot of money to this man during his absence, but he never returned; so the Kythniote thought the best thing he could do with the money was to build the Church of the Transfiguration.

In another church we saw ‘the Virgin of Athens,’ which name struck us with reminiscences of Byron; but this virgin, we are told, made her escape from that city when it fell into the hands of the Turks. She took to the sea and was washed up at Kythnos, and she is nought but a bit of old painted wood, which made me think of the sacred ksóana ^gr of antiquity, and how they used to be miraculously discovered in the sea, in trees, and in the earth, just like the pictures of the Virgin are found by the orthodox Church.

It was the first of the Greek March; a bright, warm day enough; and as we walked about the town we saw a lot of youngsters busily engaged in going from house to house singing and begging. The acolytes from the church had got hold of the cross, which they were carrying covered with flowers. I got the words from a friend, and though they are incoherent they are interesting.

‘We the three, the four, and twenty-four others have gone round the city — the city — the metropolis. March, my brave March, and dread April, too! Cast figs in the handkerchief and grapes in the basket. Hail, Adam! Hail, Chastity! Hail, honoured Cross! O joy of the apostles and wisdom of God! To-day and to-morrow and all the week, as the cross is adorned with flowers may the birds be adorned. Away, fleas, rats! away to the hills and mountains! May your cocoons be many, and tight and powerful and heavy with silk!’

This is no more nor less than a remnant of the ancient swallow festival (chelidónisma ^gr). In Macedonia, on March 1, a wooden swallow is made and encircled in leaves and put on a post, to be carried round, and the boys sing, ‘The swallow has come across the dark sea,’ just as in ancient days at the swallow feasts, revellers used to go round and collect ‘little gifts for the swallows’ (Athenaeus). Now in Thermiá, as in Macedonia, eggs are usually given to the children in return for their song. Sometimes, too, they ask a riddle on this occasion: ‘On the top like a frying pan, below like cotton, behind like scissors.’ Answer: ‘A swallow.’

Many similar customs are carried on nowadays on May 1. They go round and sing:—

And on May 1 they hang out garlands of flowers from their windows and balconies, also bunches of green ears of corn — a sort of dim relic of a feast of Demeter, and recalling the old custom of iroánthia ^gr, when at springtide the women of the Peloponnese dressed themselves in flowers and held festival.

On Good Friday and Easter they go round and sing low dirges about Lazarus’ death and Hades, receiving presents of food from each house at which they sing.

On New Year’s Eve the Thermiotes prepare cakes made of roasted corn mixed with honey and cheese; this peculiar compound they call ostoúmitos ^gr because it is made to the accompaniment of drums (ostoumpanízo, tympanízo ^gr). They have the Kallanda, too, as elsewhere; and to the children who sing them, and who throw in rose leaves at the doors as they go by, each householder feels in duty bound to present a ‘love gift.’

To-day was, as I have said, March 1, a day on which all good mothers insist on the children putting rings on their fingers — perhaps a bit of coral or some glass beads — and to this are tied two coloured threads as a protection against fevers; they wear them till Easter Day, when they are burnt in a fire lighted at the church door.

Messariá has been in its day a most unwholesome place; there are inhabitants alive now who well remember the fearful plague which carried off seven hundred people at the time of the revolution, which, out of a population of two to three thousand, is an alarming percentage; and they call this plague still ‘the plague of Loutso’ — why I could not find out — ‘when the keys remained in the doors,’ alluding to the whole families which were swept away and whose houses were left desolate. Many fled to the hills at the northern end of the island, and returned to find their houses looted by pirates, and desolate.

There are inhabitants, too, who remember when Kythnos was not so bare and desolate as it is now. The foregoing children’s song on March 1 alluded to silkworms, which were much cultivated here formerly; but one day a disease got amongst the worms, and the inhabitants cut down the mulberry trees for fuel. Olive groves also existed here, but the pirates and the Turks cut them down, for flat Thermiá had not the powers of resistance that mountainous Naxos and Andros possessed. So now it is a poor, wretched-looking place, and our host’s brother, the doctor who accompanied us in our walk, told us how subject they were to diseases, and the difficulties he had to contend with in combating the numerous superstitions attending them.

‘Children’s ailments.’ he said, ‘are more especially subject to this, and superstitious mothers, in spite of all I can say or do, insist on treating them in their own way. For sore mouths, called aftá (thrush), for example, the treatment is as follows. The mother shows the sore to the evening stars, spits on it, and says, “This evening stars and aftá, to-morrow no stars and no aftá.” For this ailment also it is considered a good thing to get a sailor who has been three times round Cape Malea to spit three times on the poor child’s sore.’

Another favourite remedy for a sickly child is to expose it to the first new moon, and for the mother to say, ‘May you have glory for what you will do, O new moon! I have an empty flask; fill it or take it from me altogether.’ There is something poetically pathetic in this last remedy. Another one, of a similar nature, which the doctor told me, somewhat reminded me of the exposure of children at Melos: the mother takes her child to a hole in a rock about half an hour from Messariá, and passes it naked through this hole, being careful to put on new garments and to throw away the old ones. On a Saturday — baking day in this island — if a mother has a child in convulsions it is considered a good plan for her to climb to the top of the oven and call out three times, ‘The wolf has taken my child!’ and someone who passes by will answer, ‘If he has taken it he will bring it back.’

‘It does not so much matter about the children,’ continued the doctor, ‘if they do die without my being called in, we just say nothing about it. But it is quite a different affair if we catch them neglecting a fever, and trusting to the burning of a reed in the fire on St. John’s Day — because they believe that fevers came into the world when St. John’s head was cut off — we are obliged to have them up and punish them for their folly.’

‘They have queer ideas about consumption, too, and, like the Andriotes, attribute it to evil spirits, called the Erinyes, which eat up the vitals of the patient, and which will seize on anyone they can when the person dies; so they are careful to prevent any young person from entering the room, and open a hole in the roof over the dead man’s head out of which the spirits can escape.’

‘This does not matter so much; it pleases them and hurts nobody,’ concluded the doctor laughing.

The Thermiotes are not only superstitious, they are an intensely religious race. No vineyard should be planted on a Friday, for this was the day of the Crucifixion, and on St. John the Baptist’s Day, in June, they stop work and sprinkle the fig trees with dust, for in June the figs are subject to destructive insects and scabs; so St. John in Thermiá is worshipped as aporeiástis̱ ^gr or psoriáris ^gr. You should never do any work if you can help it on the days immediately preceding the full moon, but for grafting, planting, cutting trees, bleaching clothes those days are the best which follow the full moon, and for killing pigs, too, for then the skin is supposed to be in the most perfect condition.

A serpent dwelling in a house is considered harmless, and called o tópakas ^gr; they never disturb it, and look upon it as the genius loci ^note. This recalls to one what Theophrastus tells us — that in his days if a serpent was found in a house an altar was erected to it, and it was looked upon as a sign of happiness.

Our quarters with Demarch Bastas were everything that could be desired, for we had an excellent bed and excellent board. The wine of Kythnos is good, but it has that peculiarity common enough on the mainland, but which we met here for the first time in the islands, it is resinated, that is to say, the barrels in which the wine is kept are covered inside with resin to preserve it, and this gives a very strong flavour of varnish to the beverage. The Greeks love this resinated wine — it acts as a tonic — and in hot weather is very refreshing; but foreigners, as a rule, are rather doubtful about it at first, though I do not think the flavour is worse than beer must be when you first drink it. The custom is by no means a modern one; Plutarch (‘Quest. Nat.’ x.) tells us how the ancients put sea water into their wine to give it a flavour, and he also tells us that the casks were smeared inside with pitch, and that the Euboeans actually did put resin into their wine to flavour it.

Another speciality of Thermiá is its cheese, so delicious that one does not wonder at Epicurus, who said that as often as he wished to sup most luxuriously he put Kythniote cheese on the table (‘Laertus,’ x. 6). It is a loose and crumbling cheese, of which you get a large helping given you on a plate; it never sets, nor is it put into those skins which compress and spoil other Greek cheeses. The curdled milk, unboiled, is slightly salted, and then put into earthenware jars and pressed until all the whey is squeezed out. Pliny tells us that it was a wild flower which grew in Kythnos which gave the delicious flavour to the cheese. I could not discover anything about it there, though the Kythniotes affirm that it is their pasturage which makes the cheese so good, just as at Ios the excellence of the mysethra was attributed to the same cause. At all events we enjoyed our cheese, and thought it worth going to Kythnos to eat, as Epicurus would say.

They have a cheese Sunday in Lent at Kythnos, which is a general festival: jovial parties gather together to laugh and sing, and the children carry about an image, covered with grass, which they call Macaroni, because, say they, he has come to fetch some of that commodity. Accordingly every householder gives them some. It is deemed very unlucky to sneeze at the cheese Sunday banquet; anyone who does must tear his coat to avert disaster. Greeks, in common with other nationalities, regard sneezing with superstition; if you are a layman they wish you good health, if you are a priest they say ‘safety’; why this distinction I could not find out.

Next day we mounted our mules and went to visit the ruins of the old town — Bryocastro, as it is called ‘Jews’ Camp,’ as many speculative etymologists read the word: but why Evraíos ^gr should become Vríos ^gr I am at a loss to imagine; surely it is more simple to call it ‘Brigands’ Camp,’ for the last people who inhabited it were Roman brigands, Phrygians, or Vríges ^gr, as the Greeks called them, and the gamma (γ) goes for nothing in modern Greek; for except the Jew who bought up the Thermiote costumes two years ago I question if a Hebrew ever set foot on the island. Greeks and Jews never did get on well together, the former apologising for even the mention of so despicable a creature as the latter.

Bryocastro is an hour’s ride from the town, and on our way to it we passed through really a lovely valley — a cleft full of green almond trees and verdure. Here all the washerwomen of Thermiá assemble to wash their linen, and the kind Demarch Bastas has built them a shed to protect them from the inclemencies of the weather. Commanding this strip of fertility are the ruins of an ancient Hellenic tower, built, say the people, by an ancient king of Thermiá to protect the washerwomen from the pirates; but it is just another instance of the numerous watchtowers in the islands placed to protect a fertile valley, as well as the only stream near the town.

The old town of Kythnos had a charming position, commanding two landlocked bays and possessing an acropolis from which an extensive view over the distant Peloponnese, Hydra, and the Saronic Gulf can be gained. On this acropolis are traces of a temple, an altar, and a reservoir, and within the precincts of the town are altars, temples, and watercourses in abundance. This acropolis is built of extraordinarily huge stones, and is known by the inhabitants as the Dragon’s House. The superstitious always put down these Cyclopean walls to the work of dragons, who with their great strength can tear up trees and hurl huge rocks, like Polyphemus of old; in fact, in one of the fables given by Von Halm the dramatis personae ^note are a dragon, who corresponds to Polyphemus, and Spanos, a wily traveller, who conquers the silly dragon, and resembles Ulysses. Out of these modern fables parallels can be found to cunning Ulysses, much struggling Hercules, the Homeric Cyclops, and a vast number of mythical personages.

Down by a promontory over against a little island which was once connected to the mainland by a pier are traces of the agora, and in the sand below is a headless half-buried statue, of Roman work, seated on a throne. I could not help wondering if this statue had ever been intended for the false Nero who ruled here for a time. He was a slave from Pontus, who so resembled Nero that he ventured to set up as the emperor, on the supposition that he had escaped death, and M. Rénan thinks St. John had this false Nero in his eye as the Antichrist of the Apocalypse. From this stronghold in Kythnos he must have been a fearful scourge to the Aegean Sea, so much so that the centurion Sisenna on his way from Syria to Rome was nearly captured by him. Galba it was who sent an armament, under Calpurnius, to Kythnos, and put an end to this adventurer’s career.

The little island in the bay is covered with traces of ruins, and, as at Kimolos, is called by the natives Daskaleió ^gr. Hither the superstitious Kythniotes still bring the bones of one of those dread wandering spirits, for a Kythniote believes firmly in Broukolakes, dead men, who for their crimes haunt the world and commit horrors after death. The priest opens the tomb of such an one on a Friday, being the only day of the week in which the dead man is supposed to remain quiet in his tomb, he then puts the bones into a sack and carries them to this lonely island and turns them out of the sack. The idea is that a ghost cannot cross water.

Above the harbour we visited three caves, ten feet long and ten feet high, cut out of the rock, and communicating with one another by two doors at the inner end. They are carefully covered with cement, and from the traces of a watercourse, which has been conducted down into them, we may argue that they were a peculiar kind of reservoir in use during the Roman epoch. Except for the actual walls all the remains of Bryocastro point to the Roman period; it appears to have been looked upon then as a strong military centre, and when the Rhodians and Attalus fought against Philip V. Kythnos did not surrender, but remained faithful to Philip, and even resisted the fleet which had captured Andros.

Another expedition which we made at Thermiá was to the town of the second epoch, the Frankish fortress on the northern headland; it is close to a disused monastery dedicated to St. George, where the Thermiotes go for their annual festival. They now call the spot ‘the fortress of beauty,’ and a more splendid situation for a fortress it is impossible to find. It crowns a rock rising 500 feet out of the sea, and is approached from the land side by only a narrow tongue of land. There is still the wall standing, which is entered by a low doorway, and inside the old churches and houses are in many cases in good preservation; but it is a desolate, weird place, and full of terror to the inhabitants.

Here in 1821 the people of Messariá took refuge from the Turks, in spite of the dread they have of the fearful demons (stoicheía ^gr) which haunt it — giants with black faces, evil-doing spirits, man-eating, like the Homeric Cyclops, who guard hidden treasures of Venetian florins which have been buried in the ruins.

After leaving this spot we came across a shepherd’s hut — ta kéllia ^gr, as they call them in Kythnos. Each proprietor has one on his property, where he stores his produce and lives during the harvest time. The owner was away just now, tending his flocks; but he had left his door so closed that by pulling a string a bolt inside was drawn, and we could go in. Here in the middle were two bags full of curd hanging from the ceiling, the whey was running off into two wooden trenchers, and above the bags were placed two large bushes of brushwood to keep off the rats, and in a corner a caldron full of whey was simmering over some charcoal ashes to make mysethra. We drank some whey and wondered at the owner’s confidence in thus leaving to the public the produce of his flock.

Beyond these simple materials for making cheese there was no sign of anything in the hut, no domestic comfort whatsoever saving a large amphora full of water, with the usual bit of sponge stuck in for a stopper; there was not even a pretence at a bed, the shepherd must just spread his skin cloak on the mud floor and sleep on that.

South of Messariá there is another village, called Sílakka, about an hour’s ride from the capital, and on the road we passed by no less than four ruined monasteries, the outer walls of which were brown and crumbling, whilst inside the whitewashed church, still taken care of to a certain extent, peeps up and seems to reproach the sacrilege around it. Sílakka is prettily situated on either side of a cleft watered by a brook; it is far prettier than the capital: the houses climb one above another, and there is a fair-sized hill behind it, which gives an air of importance to the place.

As we passed by the café one of our muleteers muttered the talismanic word ‘Demarch!’ and forthwith this functionary stalked out of the café, cast a hurried glance at us, and without a word walked on in front and lead us to his guest-room up a staircase; having done this he turned round and formally bade us welcome. Of course this was followed almost immediately by coffee, mastic, cigarettes, and questions — for it is a point of honour amongst these remote people to ask no questions until the stranger has partaken of some refreshment — quite after the style of ancient days, when after the feast was over the traveller was called upon to tell his tale.

Sílakka dates only from the days when pirates infested Thermiá, and it owes its existence to a large cave which is almost in the village, and in which in times of distress the inhabitants took refuge. It is the one sight of the place, and thither, after a seasonable rest, we were conducted by the demarch and his son and most of the villagers. Of late years the cave has been used for a public rubbish heap, and through this dusthole of ages we had to creep past old boots, dogs’ skeletons, broken crockery, and the like. Aided by the light of many candles which we and the demarch’s son and five officious little urchins carried, we got in at last: it is a curious cave, full of glorious stalactites. As we went on we came across narrow passages, thirty feet long, through which we could hardly squeeze ourselves; but our clothes by this time were as those of the Gibeonites, and could not receive any further damage. There are various chambers in the cave, large vaulted ones with firm floors; in one of these the inhabitants used to dance on the Friday after Easter, but the accumulation of mud and rubbish has obliged them to abandon this pastime. The cave is still the object of great veneration, and only for forty days after Easter is it safe to enter it, when the Nereids’ power is supposed to be dormant.

I was not sorry for this, as otherwise our retinue would have been unpleasantly large. The demarch’s son professed to believe in none of these things, and the five urchins were full of the spirit of adventure: they told us what fun they had here during those forty days after Easter; how they and all the children of Sílakka assemble in the cave to play, taking with them large bundles of brushwood for kindling a fire; and then four or five of them get into a hole, which they pointed out to us, and the others wall them in and pretend they are Nereids. All the stalactites have names — not very beautiful, for the most part — and the demarch’s son, with a bashful air, tried to gloss them over for our benefit; but the five urchins would not hear his amendments, and always corrected him.

Though the Jew already mentioned bought up all the old costumes of Thermiá, the women dress oddly enough, covering their faces so that only their eyes appear, and as they stand tending their goats by the roadside they look peculiarly Turkish; it is curious to see the general tendency in these islands for the women to cover their faces; in Amorgos they do it, too, only there they do not wear the projecting handkerchief as in Kythnos; but in these islands the Turkish influence has left no other trace, for anything Turkish would have been scorned; this custom is certainly not from an Italian source. I am inclined to look upon it as a survival of antiquity, when the face was covered with a veil. Homer represents Penelope as followed by two of her women, her face covered with a magnificent veil. Does it not arise from the old idea that women should not be seen? An Italian traveller, Foscarini ^note, in the middle ages describes how Greek women never went out of doors in broad daylight, and were never seen at public assemblies. Michael Psello, the best authority on Byzantine customs in the eleventh century, tells us how his mother wore a veil to hide her face from the gaze of men, and how the officials in attendance on the Empresses Zoe and Theodora never raised their eyes from the ground out of respect to the sex of their rulers. These veils in Thermiá are worn by the women winter and summer when out of doors, and, as they say, it is impossible to recognise even your sister when she is thus dressed. In Thermiá the peasants still, as in ancient times, make clothes out of the flaky asbestos; specimens of these garments, as made by the ancients, are to be seen in the British Museum.

We met with our usual difficulties in getting away from Kythnos, aggravated by the fact that this island possesses only two caïques, one of which was now absent at Syra. Over night the demarch made an arrangement for us with the captain (kaíksi ^gr) of the boat, and when the morning came, and the wind blew fair for carrying us to Keos, we never for a moment feared a delay. But at the appointed hour the captain never turned up, and, to our dismay, we learnt that he was in the café and refused to go. Our host was obviously angry; he accompanied me to the café, and there poured on the captain’s head all manner of abuse, calling him a ‘burnt man,’ that is to say, a fool, ‘a peacock,’ ‘no man at all,’ ‘horns,’ &c. But the captain was impervious to abuse, and sat stolidly bubbling away at his narghili.

‘It is March,’ he said at length, as if that was sufficient to convince us of the perils we wished to undertake — and perhaps to a Greek this would have been a conclusive argument, for what Greek is there who does not dread to go to sea in March? March, the fickle swain who dwells with a lovely but crossgrained mistress, and is delighted at her beauty, but grieves at her anger; March, who has deceived his eleven brothers and got a beating for so doing; March who was so angry with an old woman for thinking he was a summer month that he borrowed a day from his brother February and froze her and her flocks to death — all these allegories, and more besides, a Greek will tell you to illustrate the fickleness of this dread month. But, being English, I professed a contempt for March, and added to the other names levelled against the captain by calling him an old woman, whereupon he confided to us that he had seen a cat that morning licking herself with her face turned towards the north — a sure sign that the wind will soon blow from that dangerous quarter; and furthermore he had seen a hen flap her wings — a sure sign of a tempest.

All we could do was to laugh at the mariner’s cowardice; he was determined not to go, and to show his determination he ordered his narghili to be filled again. ‘That captain is a well-known coward,’ apologised the demarch, but afterwards we learnt that he was afraid of the wind, which was fair and southerly, preventing his return from Keos; so for once we were troubled by the wind being too fair; we had had plenty of persistent head winds and persistent calms. This was, at all events, a new experience.

Later on in the day we heard that a strange caïque was in the harbour discharging a cargo of lime, so we transported ourselves, bag and baggage, down to the harbour, and soon entered into a contract to start next morning at break of day for Keos. It was a weary, uncomfortable delay, but the day and the night passed somehow, the latter in the bathhouse; and ere the sun had risen we had left Kythnos far behind.