“Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, O, give me back my heart.”
But his eyes wuzn’t on Athens at all. They wuz on Dorothy, and her face flushed up as rosy a pink as ever Miss Sapho’s did when she wuz keepin’ company.
After we left the boat we rode over a level plain with green trees by the wayside till we reached Athens and put up at a good tarven. Athens, “The eye of Greece,” mother of arts and eloquence, wuz built in the first place round the Acropolis, a hill about three hundred feet high, and is a place that has seen twice as many ups and downs as Jonesville. But then it’s older, three or four thousand years older, I spoze, and has had a dretful time on’t since Mr. Theseus’s day, take it with its archons or rulers, kings and generals, and Turks, Goths and Franks, etc.
But it become the fountainhead of learning and civilization, culture and education of the mind and the body. In that age of health and beauty, study and exercise, the wimmen didn’t wear any cossets, consequently they could breathe 387 deep breaths and enjoy good health, and had healthy little babies that they brought up first-rate as fur as the enjoyment of good health goes, and Arvilly said she knew they didn’t drink to excess from the looks of their statutes.
Athens also claims to be one of the birthplaces of Homer, that good old blind poet. Robert Strong talked quite a good deal about his poems, the Iliad and the Odyssy or the return of Ulysses Odysses to his native land.
Josiah paid great attention to it, and afterwards he confided to me that he thought of writin’ a Jodyssy or the return of Josiah to Jonesville. He said when he recounted all his wanderin’s and tribulations on the road and at tarvens with starvation and tight clothes and all the other various hampers he’d been hampered with he said that it would beat that old Odyssy to nothin’ and nobody would ever look at it agin. “Why,” sez he, “jest think how old that is, most a thousand years B. C. It is time another wuz writ, and I’m the one to write it.”
But I shall try to talk him out of it. He said he shouldn’t begin it till our return to Jonesville, so Ury could help him in measurin’ the lines with a stick. And when I am once mistress of my own cook-stove and buttery I have one of the most powerful weepons in the world to control my pardner with.
I hain’t no great case to carry round relics, but I told Josiah that I would give a dollar bill quick if I could git holt of that old lantern that Diogenes used to carry round here in the streets in broad daylight to find Truth with. How I’d love to seen Mr. Diogenes and asked him if he ever found her.
Josiah said he would ruther own his wash-tub that he used to travel round in. And which he wuz settin’ in when Alexander the Great asked him what costly gift he could bestow on him. And all that contented, independent creeter asked for wuz to have the king not git between him and the sun.