• The end of summer is th' e theme of
a letter from one of our beneficent workers in Greece. "In the village (in Epirus) there is a rather pretty soft-leaved shrub svith- a flower the colour of 4ceanothus (Ligaria). It is the last flower of summer." The letter (a little blotted by a fall into Acheron!) gives grim illustrations of the thesis that goats, in the flesh, not in parable, are among the greatest enemies of civilisation on most Mediterranean and Aegean shores. "-The* surface; if it ever existed, has been gullied away and is so rough that one has to look at the ground, rather than the view. -When -one does look up,: one sees *other signs of soil erosion. Red or orange gravelly bits of land washed away in deep gullies, the grey rocks often showing a curious formation, being in rows • like dragons' teeth." Most of this, like the bareness of the slopes in Eastern Spain and the deserts of North Africa, is due in large measure to the goats that eat away the surface growth even more closely than a grazing horse. The paragraph ends: " Metaxas was right in trying to prevent the keeping, of goats in Greece." Even spring showed none of the sheets of flowers that mark its arrival in Switzerland or England. My own recollection of Grecian flowers very early in the year is of a little black iris and a line of stocks along the coast and at Marathon.-
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