CHAPTER I.AT THE AUSTRIAN EMBASSY.The Austrian embassy at Athens was more largely and more brilliantly attended than usual. At nine o'clock the Patissia Road showed a line of carriages going backward towards the Platea Omonia from the gaily-lighted embassy. All the foreign ministers were there, as well as the Prime Minister of Greece, and whatever distinguished travellers Athens had the honour of entertaining at that time, -it being winter, there was a goodly number. A Russian Prince or two, presented by the Russian minister; two eminent English politicians on their way to Constantinople for a confidential exchange of views with the Sublime Sultan, to be remembered by jewelled snuff-boxes or some such trifles; a sprightly French mathematician straight from Paris the Blest; a half-dozen of celebrated archæologists, furnished by Europe and the United States, all viewing each other with more or less malevolence and suspicion-the Frenchman noticeably not on speaking terms with his distinguished brother from Germany; Dr. Jarovisky of world renown, fresh from Pergamos[Pg 6] and recent discoveries at Argos, speaking various languages as badly as possible; a genial and witty Irish professor rushing through Greece with the intention of writing an exhaustive analysis of the country and the people, in that spirit of amiable impertinence so characteristic of hasty travellers. There was the flower of the so-called Greek aristocracy: Phanariote Princes, Græco-Italian Counts from Zante and Corfu, and retired merchants and speculators from Constantinople and Smyrna and London. There was a Greek poet, hardly distinguishable in accent and manner from a Parisian, except in a detail of appearance which gave him the head of a convict, so hideously do the Hellenes shave their heads to look as if they wore mouse-coloured skull caps; a prose translator of Shakespeare, who had lately visited the Immortal's shrine at Warwick, and, in the interests of local colouring modelled himself since his return as closely as possible upon the accepted type of the English man of letters, and surveyed the frivolities under his eye with a British impassivity and glacial neutrality of gaze. All the musical dilettanti of the city of the Wise Maid were there, and all its presentable women. Some of the girls were pretty, and all were thickly powdered and richly dressed; all had large, brilliant dark eyes. And the gowns and frocks from Paris, the jewels, lace, aigrettes, flowers, and bare arms and shoulders made an effective and troublous contrast with the preponderance of masculine evening attire and semi-official splendour.....