custom of Greek towns has so decidedly appropriated to them as the
proper station of their sex, that a man would be looked upon as
utterly effeminate if he ventured to choose that situation for the
keeping of the saints' days. I was present one day at a treaty for
the hire of some apartments at Smyrna, which was carried on between
Carrigaholt and the Greek woman to whom the rooms belonged.
Carrigaholt objected that the windows commanded no view of the
street. Immediately the brow of the majestic matron was clouded,
and with all the scorn of a Spartan mother she coolly asked
Carrigaholt, and said, "Art thou a tender damsel that thou wouldst
sit and gaze from windows?" The man whom she addressed, however,
had not gone to Greece with any intention of placing himself under
the laws of Lycurgus, and was not to be diverted from his views by
a Spartan rebuke, so he took care to find himself windows after his
own heart, and there, I believe, for many a month, he kept the
saints' days, and all the days intervening, after the fashion of
Grecian women.

Oh! let me be charitable to all who write, and to all who lecture,
and to all who preach, since even I, a layman not forced to write
at all, can hardly avoid chiming in with some tuneful cant! I have
had the heart to talk about the pernicious effects of the Greek
holidays, to which I owe some of my most beautiful visions! I will
let the words stand, as a humbling proof that I am subject to that
immutable law which compels a man with a pen in his hand to be
uttering every now and then some sentiment not his own. It seems
as though the power of expressing regrets and desires by written
symbols were coupled with a condition that the writer should from
time to time express the regrets and desires of other people; as
though, like a French peasant under the old regime, one were bound