the barrow in honor of the doughty king of Salamis; but only its ruins are visible at the present day. Round the tumuli of Achilles Alexander is said to have run naked when he came here in the pagan centuries with "Homer's Iliad" in his pocket, which he must temporarily have laid aside when he performed the rather

PAUL, THE APOSTLE.

doubtful feat. We varied the Macedonian's plan by making the circuit soberly on horseback and retaining our clothes, after which we threaded Choiseul's old ditch of excavation, and plucked a poppy growing over the old warrior's slumber of three thousand years.

Passing into the heart of the Trojan plain, our spirit fired up with the thought of battle, like a war charger's It is a magnificent place for a battle-field. Esdraelon, Waterloo, or Gettysburg

pictures. There are no hillocks to obstruct the view, no ravines for ambuscades; smooth as a floor, green with the rank wild grass in some places, blooming in others with flowers of delicately contrasted beauty, it seemed the very place for a battle, the convenient and appropriate theatre for a scene of wholesale murder. Not far away moves a silvery line bisecting the plain; it is the yellow Scamander of Homer, now the modern Mendere. The waving willows on its banks are descendants of those older ones from whose recesses the crafty Sinon was pulled forth by the Trojan herdsmen to relate his trumped-up story of the wooden horse, "baneful source of Ilium's woes." Right here perhaps stood the architectural monster with its belly full of armed Greeks, and around it thronged the wondering Trojans with doubting Laocoon and plotting Thymoetes at their head. The "heaven-born Scamander" hardly looked the stream we dreamed of in those far-away hours of boyhood when we scanned the sonorous hexameters of the epic bard. It is a placid flowing stream enough, with a channel that a horse would span with three leaps; but it has deep swelling eddies as of old, when it rose and joined the fray against Achilles and his Myrmidons. In the spring time, when its flood is swollen by the snow from the maternal bosom of Mother Ida, it might possibly perform the epic feats ascribed to it; but not otherwise. The classic stream and its brother Simois seems in fact never to have recovered from the stroke of Hephaistas's and Hero's animosity, which, if we may credit Homer, almost dried up their channels.

On a long, low ridge overlooking the plain northward and westward are the exhumed ruins of Priam's capital. It was long a debatable point with scholars whether it was here or at a place higher up the plain, called Bounarbashi, where the site of old Troy was to be looked for. The testimony of antiquity favored Hissarlik; modern investigators were in favor of Bounarbashi. Strabo, Xerxes and Alexander found, however, a modern defender in the German Doctor Schliemann. the summer of 1870 the earnest archaeologist began his labors, and with intervals of interruptions by the jealous Ottoman government, continued them till he exhumed the long-buried city of the Ilaid. The treasures that he unearthed has convinced the

In

world as to the identification of the ancient city's locality, and as we have remarked, have had their influence upon the semi-mythological narrative of Homer. The ruins of Priam's palace have been laid bare; the walls which Poseidon and Appallon reared, the streets through which the pious son of Aphrodite bore the aged Ancherses from their burning home, the Scean gate where the Trojan councillors sat and talked of Spartan Helen's beauty, have all been opened to the gaze of men. Precious remains of art, antique pottery, gold and silver ornaments, such as may have been worn by the domestic Andromache or the ranting Cassandra, have all been brought to the light, richly rewarding the labors of the enthusiastic archæologist. Those who would learn more of the wonderful discoveries of Dr. Schliemann must read his great work, "Troy and its Remains." Our object is not to discuss these exhumations, interesting as that would be; but to deliaeate as briefly as possible the geography of this famous land.

Standing on the excavated site of Hissarlik, away from the skeptical west, under the Mysian sky, all of Homer's definitely described landscapes sweep in upon the vision. Many-fountained Ida, with its long range of hills, bounds the horizon on the east. The struggling, slugglish stream of the Simois, its banks bordered with wild roses, and its channel half-filled with reeds, flows yonder at your left. It is scarcely more than a creek, and its insignificance reconciles one to the offence against the Homeric nomenclature which the Turks have committed in naming the modern stream Dumbrek. Westward lies once more the vision of the islands in the Ægean, Tenedos, behind which the Greek fleet lay hid during the last night of the siege, rising green out of the sea almost at your feet. In front rises out of the plain a lofty mound, the work of human hands, which is the supposed tomb of Myrinne, about which the auxiliary troops and Trojan warriors mustered under Hector and Æneus before the battles.

It is singular how this unearthed site meets all the requirements of Homer's locality. All the picturesque, warlike and domestic details of the siege are recalled with vividness. One feels that

he is treading the actual classic soil of the Iliad. The "high, wide-paved city" looms up before you. Priam's stately courts, the citadel of Troy, the doings of Paris and Helen, of Hector and Andromache, the thronging of the heralds about the gates, the going forth of mailed warriors and of flashing chariots, the old chiefs of Ilium sitting at the Scaan gate, and the white-armed daughter of Olympian Zeus among them pointing out with jeweled hands the Grecian princes to their admiring gaze, and all the memories of the past throng with wonderful distinctness upon the mind. You even note the fact that Achilles' feat of dragging dead Hector behind his chariot around the doomed city could easily be performed. Few traces of the civilization which was destroyed when gods and men united to punish a prince for perfidy and lust, remain; but there in the presence of the landmarks

TOMB AT MYSISA.

he painted, Homer's pictures have a reality that can never be experienced elsewhere.

The thought, too, comes while you stand above the ruins of the defunct city, overlooking the nar

row Ilian plain, that Priam's kingdom was after all a very petty affair. But so were all the kingdoms of those days. The Trojan war was removed only

against Israel. The territorial limits of Ilium proper, however, must have been small; but it was a rich and fertile territory, and there is no

reason to suppose that its actual importance was exaggerated by the poet.

With our pockets filled with fragments of broken earthenware picked from the chinks of the uncovered walls, which our fancy converted into debris. of the city destroyed by Agamemnon, and several coins that must have been contemporary with the later Roman city that was built upon its ruins, we rode forward in the afternoon sun to the Turkish village of Bounarbashi. Our way lay along the course of the Scamander, whose course we could, trace at this point far up among the defiles of Ida. What memories of the past cheered us as we rode slowly up the banks of the ancient stream! Some shepherds feeding their flocks .on the slopes recalled visions of Paris and Enone, of Anchises and Ganymede, whose feet must often have pressed those very hillsides. The surrounding landscapes were beautiful, flushed with the warm sunlight of a summer afternoon. The dreamy silence made the scenes more impressive. We were wandering in a land where, as in that of the Lotus Eaters, it seemed always afternoon. Lovely flowers and luxuriant grasses were growing under our feet. Fertile as the land is to-day, needing only the hand of cultivation to bring out its richness, we may well believe the stories of its ancient profuseness. Upon the level plain I was then traversing, on either side of the Scamander, were the meadows over which ranged the three thousand mares of the opulent Ericthonius, Priam's great grandfather, and an early king of Troy.

two hundred years or thereabouts from Joshua's conquest of Canaan; and the reader will remember that nearly one chapter of the book which bears the Jewish leader's name is occupied in enumerating the petty kings who divided Palestine among them. Every walled town had its own incorporated government and its king. The land of Canaan was no larger than Lesser Phrygia, over which the Trojan king seemed to possess a nominal supremacy, and the latter's alliances with the distant countries of Lycia, Cilicia and Greater Phrygia marks him as equal in power at least to the Canaanitish Adonibezek, who fed seventy tributary kings at his table; or to the formidable Jabin king of Hazor, who made a confederacy

The site of Bounarbashi is about eight miles from Hissarlik, covering an elevation considerably raised above the Trojan plain. How any one