Mattina made no resistance, but as she fell back she murmured:—
“It is not my head, it is my stomach which is giddy.”
It went on getting so much giddier that when at last they arrived at Piræus[8] Yanni had to carry her down the side of the steamer to the little boat and when she was lifted out on the quay she could scarcely stand. However, the fresh air and the walk to the railway station revived her.
The railway carriage in which they traveled up to Athens was very crowded, and the fat woman sitting next to Mattina seemed very cross.
“Why do they not put more carriages?” she enquired of no one in particular. “We are jammed as flat here as squashed mosquitoes.” But to Mattina who had never even ridden in a cart in her life, it was wonderful. The swift rushing, the bump, bump of the carriages, the man with a gold band on his cap who looked at the tickets and gave them back again, and who said to Yanni while he was searching for theirs, “Come, now; hurry! The new day will dawn by the time you find it!” … the stopping at Phalerum[9] and at the Theseum[10] before they got out at the Monastiraki[11] Station.
Then there was the street-car; the rush through narrow streets at first, and then through wider and wider ones, till they stopped at a wonderful big square full of people. In all her eleven years, Mattina had never imagined so many men and women and children and horses and carriages together. The square seemed to her surrounded by palaces, till Yanni showed her the one in which the King lived, and over which the flag was flying.
Then the car went on again, and the streets got narrower again, and at last Yanni got off the little platform at the back of the car and Mattina scrambled after him.
“Come!” he said, “your uncle’s oven is quite close by here and I have work to do after I leave you.”
Up one narrow steep street, a turn to the left, along a still narrower street almost like a Poros one but far, far dustier, and they came to a stop before a small baker’s shop. On the open slab of the window were quantities of ring-shaped loaves, and heaped up piles of oven-cakes covered with squares of pink muslin. A man was counting some smaller loaves in the dimness of the back of the shop, and a tidy stout woman in a big blue apron was standing at the door.
“Good day to you,” said Yanni, “I bring you your niece from Poros.”