seas.

like to turn over maps, to search out routes though we may never follow them except on paper-innocent stay-at-home geographers of this sort have supposed that it was a simple matter to learn the names of the islands which one meets in any well-known track across well-known This is a mistake. From Corfu to Patras, and, later, on the way to Egypt and Syria, and back through the Strait of Messina to Genoa, I saw many small islands-it seemed to me that they could have been counted by hundreds-which are not indicated in the ordinary guidebooks, and whose names no one on the steamers knew, not even the captains. The captains, the pilots, and all the officers were of course aware of the exact position in the sea of each one; that was part of their business. But as to names, these mariners, whether Englishmen, Germans, Italians, Turks, or Greeks (and we sailed with all), appeared to share the common opinion that they had none; their manner was that they deserved

none.

Abreast of Paxo, on the mainland, is the small village of Parga. The place has its own tragic history connected with its cession to the Turks in 1815. But I am afraid that its principal association in my mind is the frivolous one of a roaring chorus, "Robbers all at Parga!" This song may be as much of a libel as that bold ballad concerning the beautiful town at the eastern end of Lake Erie; the ladies of that place are not in the habit of "coming out to-night, to dance by the light of the moon," and in the same way there may never have been any robbers worth speaking of at Parga. It is Hobhouse who tells the story. "In the evening preparations were made for feeding our Albanians. After eating, they began to dance round the fire to their own singing with an astonishing energy. One of their songs begins, When we set out from Parga, there were sixty of us.' Then comes the chorus: Robbers all at Parga! Robbers all at Parga! As they roared out this stave they whirled round the fire, dropped to and rebounded from their knees, and again whirled round in a wild circle, chanting it at the top of their voices:

"Robbers all at Parga!

Robbers all at Parga!'"

At Parga we met the Byronic legend, which from this point hangs over the

whole Ionian Sea. Parga is not far from the Castle of Suli, and with the word "Suliote" we are launched aloft into the resplendent realm of Byron's poetry, which seems as beautiful and apparitionlike as the Oberland peaks viewed from Berne - shining cliffs, so celestially and impossibly fair, far up in the sky. The country near Parga is described at length in the second canto of "Childe Harold." The third island of the Ionian group is Santa Maura, the Leucadia of the ancients. It looks like a chain of mountains set in the sea. I see a long, lofty promontory ending in a silvery headland. I see it flushed with the rose tints of sunset, high above a violet sea. Of course I was looking for it; every one looks for the rock from which dark Sappho flung herself in her despair. But, even without Sappho, it is a striking cliff; it rises perpendicularly from deep water, and it is so white that one fancies that it must be visible even upon the darkest night. All day its towering opaline crest serves as a beacon from afar. The temple of Apollo which once crowned its summit can still be traced in sculptured fragments, though there are no marble columns, like those that gleam across the waves from Sunium.

As the steamer crossed from Santa Maura to Cephalonia we had a clear view of little Ithaca, the Ithaca which Ulysses loved, "not because it was broad, but because it was his own." Except Paxo, Ithaca is the smallest of the sister islands. Sir William Gell and Dr. Schliemann between them have discovered at Ithaca all the sites of the Odyssey, even to the stone looms of the nymphs. Other explorers, with colder minds, have decided that at least the author of the poem must have had an acquaintance with the island, for some of his descriptions are accurate.

The next island, Cephalonia, is the largest of the Ionian group. There is much to say about it. But I must not say it here. The truth is that one sails past these sisters as the slippery Ulysses sailed past the sirens; they are so beautiful that one must tie one's hands to the mast (or the table) to keep them from writing a volume on the subject.

At Zante, for some unexplained cause, the classic associations suddenly vanished: Homer faded, Theocritus followed him; Pliny and Strabo disappeared. We

were back in the present; we must have some Zante flowers and Zante trinkets; we thought of nothing but going ashore. We landed, and went roaming through the yellow town. Zante is the most cheerful-looking place I have ever seen. The bay ripples and smirks; it is so pretty that it knows it is pretty, and it smirks accordingly. The town, stretching, with its gayly tinted houses, round a level semicircle at the edge of the water, smiles, as one may say, from ear to ear. And this joyful expression is carried up the hill, by charming gardens, orange groves, and vineyards, to the Venetian fort at the top, which, as we saw it in the brilliant sunshine, with the birds flying about it, seemed to be throwing its cap into the sky with a huzza.

"O hyacinthine isle! O purple Zante!
Isola d'oro! Fior di Levante!"

sang Poe, borrowing his chimes this time, however, from an Italian song "Zante, Zante, fior di Levante!" This flower of the Levant exports not flowers, but fruit. The currants, which had vaguely presented themselves at Santa Maura and Cephalonia, now came decisively to the front. One does not think of these little berrylettes as ponderous. But when one beholds tons of them, cargoes for ships, one regards them with a new respect. It was probably the brisk commercial aspect of the currants which made the port look so modern. All the Ionian Islands except Corfu export currants, but Zante throws them out to the world with both hands. I must confess that I have always blindly supposed (when I thought of it at all) that the currant of the plum-pudding was the same fruit as the currant of our gardens-that slightly acrid red berry which grows on bushes that follow the lines of back fences-bushes that have patches of weedy ground under them where hens congregate. I fancied that by some process unknown to me, at the hands of persons equally unknown (perhaps those who bring flattened raisins from grapes), these berries were dried, and that they then became the well-known ornament of the Christmas cake. It was at Zante that my shameful ignorance was made clear to me. Here I learned that the dried fruit of commerce is a dwarf grape, which has nothing in common with currant jelly. Its English name, currant, is taken from the French "raisin de Co

rinthe," or Corinth grape, a title bestowed because the fruit was first brought into notice at Corinth. We have stolen this

name in the most unreasonable way for our red berry. Then, to make the confusion worse, as soon as we have put the genuine currants into our puddings and cakes, we turn round and call them "plums!" The real currant, the dwarf grape of Corinth, is about as large as a gooseberry when ripe, and its color is a deep violet-black; the vintage takes place in August. It is not a hardy vine. It attains luxuriance, I was told, only in Greece; and even there it is restricted to the northern Peloponnesus, the shores of the Gulf of Corinth, and the Ionian Islands.

Zante is the sixth of the islands, and as the steamer leaves her, still smiling gayly over her dimpling bay, it seems proper to cast at least a thought in the direction of the seventh sister, upon whom we are now turning our backs. Why Cerigo should have been included in the Ionian group, I do not know; it lies off the southernmost point of Greece, near Cape Malea, and might more reasonably be classed with the Cyclades, or with Crete. Birthplace of Aphrodite, Cythera of the ancients, though it is, I have never met any one who has landed there. ple going by sea to Athens from Naples, or from Brindisi, pass it in their course.

Peo

The voyage northward to Missolonghi is beautiful. The sea was dotted with white wings. The Greeks are bold sailors; one never observes here the timidity, the haste to seek refuge anywhere and everywhere, which is so conspicuous along the Riviera and the western coast of Italy. Throughout the Ionian archipelago, and it was the same later among the islands of the Ægean, it was inspiring to note the smallest craft, far from land, dashing along under full sail, leaning far over as they flew.

Missolonghi is a small abortive Venice, without the gondolas; it is situated on a lagoon, and a causeway nearly two miles long leads to it, across the shallow water. Vague and unimportant as it is upon its muddy shore, it was the soul of the Greek revolution. It has been through terrible sieges. During one of these, Marcos Botzaris was in command, and his grave is outside the western gate. A few years ago, all the school-boys in America could chant his requiem; perhaps they chant it

still.

Missolonghi is on the northern shore of the bay; to reach Patras, the steamer crosses to the Peloponnesus side, and here we leave the Ionian Sea.

There is now a railroad from Patras to Athens. On the morning when we made the transit there was given to us for our sole use a saloon on wheels, which was much larger than the compartments of an English railway carriage, and smaller than an American parlor car. In its centre was a long table, and a cushioned bench ran round its four sides; broad windows gave us a wide view of the landscape as we rolled (rather slowly) along. The track follows the gulf all the way, and we passed through miles of vineyards. But I did not think of currants here; they had been left behind at Zante. There is, indeed, only one thing to think

of, and the heart beats quickly as Parnassus lifts its head above the other snow-clad summits. We ought to have been crossing the gulf in a Phæacian boat, which needs no pilot, or, at the very least, in a bark with an azure prow. But even upon an iron track through utilitarian currant fields, the spell descends again when the second peak becomes visible at the eastern end of the bay.

"Not here, O Apollo,

Are haunts meet for thee, But where Helicon breaks down In cliff to the sea-"

How many times, in lands far from here, had I read these lines for their mere beauty, without hope of more!

And now before my eyes was Helicon itself.

IF

F one were to ask his friends what mineral we are most familiar with and most commonly used as food, the answers would probably be both varied and amusing. Salt would, I fancy, first suggest itself to many, and to those whose training in physiology and hygiene has not been neglected, no doubt the claims of lime and iron and carbon, which, in one form or another, we use with food to build up bone and brawn, would be amply urged. But, after all, it is water, for water is a mineral-a fused mineral. You will find it described as such, along with quartz and topaz and the diamond, in Dana's Mineralogy, or in other treatises on stones.

We usually think of minerals as solid things, such as metals and rocks and jew els and various chemical salts. But when we consider the matter a little we see that all these things if melted by strong heat are minerals still, only they are now in a fluid instead of in a solid state. The difference between these minerals and water is that water gets fluid at a lower temperature than they do, and, like quicksilver, stays melted at ordinary living heat. But in those old ice ages which, one after another, have swept now over the Northern and now over the Southern hemisphere, bringing ruin and desolation, the natural and common condition of water was that of a solid-ice-as it largely is to-day out

of-doors in winter when not kept fused by the stored-up heat of the soil and rocks, or melted by the sun.

Everybody knows that water can exist as a solid (ice), as a liquid, and as a gas (steam).

The remarkable differences in appearance which water presents when in these different conditions depend simply upon the amount of heat which it contains. But what is heat?

Every well-informed person knows nowadays that heat is not a material thing as it was once supposed to be, which could be stored away in one substance and forced out of another, or which could be conjured into being here and annihilated there at the will of man. Heat is a kind of motion of the ultimate particles of which matter is composed. It is one of the ways in which what the physicists call energy manifests itself. Water, like all other substances, is made up of exceedingly small ultimate structures called molecules. And when these molecules of water are left to themselves, they tend to become grouped in certain definite ways to form a solid mass which we call ice. This is their natural resting state. When the molecules are exposed to the kind of motion or undulation which we call heat, they lose their fixed and definite relation to one another, and become mobile or vi

brant, and then we have the fluid-water. Increase this molecular motion by exposing them to further heat, and they shun one another in a frenzy of vibration, and this is steam. The curious thing about it is that the steam can only become water again, and the water ice, by giving up this heat to something else—that is, when the molecules can set a-swinging the molecules of some other thing.

If you put a lump of ice into a kettle of cold water and put it over a flame, the ice will gradually melt, but the temperature of the water will not rise above that of melting ice until all is fluid. A large amount of heat seems to have been lost. The force which this vanished heat represents seems to have been annihilated. It has not been lost, however, but has been simply transferred to the molecules which were still in the ice, but are now, in consequence of the heat transfer, swinging back and forth in the fluid water.

Heat the water still further, and the temperature will rise until it reaches the boiling point-100° centigrade or 212° Fahrenheit-and there it stays until the whole of the water has been converted into steam. Make the fire as furious as you like, not one degree hotter does the water get. The heat here too seems to be lost. It is not; but, as before, is converted into molecular motion- a motion so intense that the molecules of the water fly apart, and thus make of the water a gas-steam. This heat, which disappears in melting the ice and in converting the water into steam, is called the latent heat of water and steam respectively, which means simply that it is being temporarily employed in inducing moderate or intense molecular motion.

We are told, and can intellectually grasp the fact, that the heat which makes our earth inhabitable, and directly or indirectly supplies nearly all the varied forms of power which are used in the world's work, comes from the sun. Of the heat which is poured down upon the earth in the daytime a large portion is stored temporarily in the rocks and soil and water; much is used up in the evaporation of the water to form the atmospheric moisture and the clouds; much is consumed in the building up of the bodies of animals and plants. But all the time the supra-atmospheric spaces claim a large share of the stored-up heat.

Heat is of an unrestful nature, and is

readily communicated from one body to another by contact or by radiation.

We rarely realize, I think, how easily the earth parts with this heat, and how cold space is through which the earth sweeps in its orbit. Nor do we commonly appreciate how relentlessly space sucks away the heat which the earth has garnered from the sunbeams, out into its illimitable depths. 'Way out in space is a cold so intense that we fairly fail to grasp its meaning. Perhaps 300 or 400 degrees below the freezing-point of water, some philosophers think, are the dark recesses beyond our atmosphere. And night and day, summer and winter, this insatiate space is robbing us of our heat, and fighting with demoniac power to reduce our globe to its own bitter chill. So, after all, our summer and winter temperatures are only maintained by the residue of the sun's heat which we have been able to store up and keep hold of in spite of the pitiless demands of space. Our margin sometimes gets so reduced on nights in winter that we can readily believe the astronomers and physicists when they tell us that a reduction of the sun's heat by seven per cent. and a slight increase in the number of winter days would suffice to bring again to our hemisphere a new Age of Ice, with its inevitable desolation. The balance is really a nice one between the heat we daily gather from the sun and the share of it which we lose in space.

This is most comprehensible on cold winter nights. The genial sunbeams have struck the earth aslant, and but for a few hours, so that the soil and rocks and atmosphere have gathered during the day but little store to last over the long night; and from every exposed surface on the earth out rushes the garnered heat of the day into this more than freezing void. You can fairly feel it tugging at your face and hands.

Water out-of-doors in winter feels it too, and little by little grows colder and colder. The clashing of its molecules against each other, which is all that has made it a fluid, becomes less and less vigorous. Their mutual attractions, which have been antagonized and held in check by the furious commotion which the sun's heat had wrought, come slowly into play, until finally the molecules rush together in those groups and masses which we call crystals, and for the first time perhaps in months or years sink into rest. The sym

phonies of motion in the water which the heat had conjured into being as it struck molecule upon molecule fade softly into a simple harmony of form at the bidding of insatiate space. A pellicle of crystal ice, once formed over the surface of

ICE STARS.

the water, transmits out into the cold space the heat from the water below, which so, film by film, grows stark.

Most fluids shrink as they lose their heat, but water, curiously enough, just as it becomes solid in freezing, expands about

of its volume, and thus becomes, bulk for bulk, lighter than water. And that is why ice forms a protecting cover to our streams and lakes and ponds; that is why icebergs swim so much above the surface instead of sinking in the sea; and that is why the mineral ice floats in the fused mineral, water, tinkling against the glass beside you as you dine. That, too,

is why water-pipes burst in winter, and why those hoarse, uncanny boomings greet us in the night-time from freezing lakes. and ponds.

We have seen that when water loses a certain amount of its heat it becomes solid. But something more than that occurs; it becomes crystallized. Ice is not like glass, simply a transparent solid, although to the eye it looks much the same. Certain substances, and among them water, when they pass from the liquid to the solid state, assume regular geometrical forms, and these are crystals. The diamond is crystallized carQuartz is a crystallized compound of silicon and oxygen, just as ice is a crystallized compound of hydrogen and

substances possess mutual attractions, in virtue of which, when not held in abeyance by external forces, such as heat, they arrange themselves in fixed and definite relationship to one another. These relationships of the molecules are revealed in crystals by the geometrical forms which they assume.

Although these forms of crystals vary endlessly, they are all readily grouped in a very few simple systems. Some are simple cubes or modifications of this form; some are six-sided prisms, like the common rock-crystal, and like ice. The crys

tals may be very minute, or they may be very large; their sides may be broad or narrow; but the angles which their sides or faces form with one another are fixed and invariable. Crystals can grow, too, by the deposit of new material over the surfaces of the old.

When crystals or masses of crystallized minerals are broken apart, they tend to separate along certain definite planes, determined by the crystalline form, and called planes of cleavage.

Common rock-crystals or quartz crystals, such as spectacle lenses are some

&

ICE FLOWERS.

times made of, represent a crystalline group called, from their form, hexagonal prisms.

But we do not usually see the crystalline forms when we look at a lump of clear ice. It looks quite homogeneous and structureless, like glass, save that here and there bubbles of air may be