So we set out with great pomp and circumstance, each on his beast—­alogon, the Unreasonable Thing, is the word for horse—­while a fifth, with two drivers, carried our goods.  A ride of about three hours—­passing the silent and deserted Tiryus—­brought us to the village of Charvati, the modern representative of the ‘rich Mycenae.’  Here, while Dehmetri prepared our breakfast, we followed a villager, who led us by rapid strides up the rocky hill toward the angle formed by two mountains.  As we rose over one elevation after another, he plucked his hands full of dry grass and brush, and then leading us into a hole in the side of the hill, informed us in good classic Greek that it was the tomb of Agamemnon.  It is a large, round apartment, rising to the hight of forty-nine feet, and of about the same width, the layers of masonry gradually approaching one another until a single stone caps the whole; not conical in shape, however, but like a beehive.  A single monstrous stone, twenty-seven feet long and twenty wide, is placed over the doorway.  The whole is buried with earth, and covered with a growth of grass and shrubs, and a passage leads from it into a smaller chamber hewn in the solid rock, in which our guide lighted the fuel he had gathered.  The gloomy walls were lighted up for a moment, then when the fire died away, we returned to the open air.  A little further on is the famous gateway with two lionesses carved in relief above—­the armorial bearings, we may call it, of the city—­and in every direction are seen massive walls, foundation-stones, ruins of gates and of subterraneous chambers like the first we visited, conical hillocks, probably containing others in equally good preservation, and other marks of the busy hand of man—­’Spuren ordnender Menschenhand unter dem Gestraeuch.’  Sidney Smith says:  ’It is impossible to feel affection beyond seventy-eight degrees or below twenty degrees of Fahrenheit....  Man only lives to shiver or to perspire.’  I think it is so with the sublime and beautiful, and deeply as I felt in the abstract the privilege I enjoyed in standing on the citadel of Agamemnon, and seeing the most venerable ruins that Europe can boast, that keen March wind was too much for me, and I was not sorry to return to the khan, where, sitting cross-legged on the floor, we ate with our fingers a roast chicken dissected with the one knife of the family, and drank a bumper of resinous wine.

After dinner we remounted and rode back through the broad plain to Argos, traversed its narrow, dirty streets, stared at by the Argive youth, examined its grass-grown theatre, cast wistful eyes at the lofty citadel of Larissa, which time forbade us to ascend, then wound along the foot of the mountain-range, saw at a distance on the seashore a spot of green, which we were told was Lerna, where Hercules slew the hydra, and near the road an old ruined pyramid, which we afterward examined more closely, then followed a mountain-path,