"These ladies, since the death of the consul, their father, depend on
strangers living in their spare room and closet,--which we now occupy.
But, though so poor, their virtue shines as conspicuously as their
beauty.
"Not all the wealth of the East, or the complimentary lays even of the
first of England's poets, could render them so truly worthy of love
and admiration."[134]
Ten weeks had flown rapidly away, when the unexpected offer of a
passage in an English sloop of war to Smyrna induced the travellers to
make immediate preparations for departure, and, on the 5th of March,
they reluctantly took leave of Athens. "Passing," says Mr. Hobhouse,
"through the gate leading to the Piraeus, we struck into the
olive-wood on the road going to Salamis, galloping at a quick pace, in
order to rid ourselves, by hurry, of the pain of parting." He adds,
"We could not refrain from looking back, as we passed rapidly to the
shore, and we continued to direct our eyes towards the spot, where we
had caught the last glimpse of the Theseum and the ruins of the
Parthenon through the vistas in the woods, for many minutes after the
city and the Acropolis had been totally hidden from our view."
At Smyrna Lord Byron took up his residence in the house of the
consul-general, and remained there, with the exception of two or three
days employed in a visit to the ruins of Ephesus, till the 11th of
April. It was during this time, as appears from a memorandum of his
own, that the two first Cantos of Childe Harold, which he had begun
five months before at Ioannina, were completed.
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