Word: hellespont
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...Private William Farrance of the British Army, whom she had met by mail. Said she: "I have thought the matter over and feel convinced that I shall never be able to settle clown as a wife until I have successfully swum the Irish Channel, the Wash, and the Hellespont. What is the use of letting a man make a home for me when in my thoughts the sea spells 'home, sweet home...
These sentences are not, although style and substance would suggest such an hypothesis, a translation of the passage in which Herodotus describes the ceremony with which King Xerxes inaugurated his building of the first bridge across the Hellespont. They are, instead, excerpts from a letter which John H. O'Connor, 28, onetime citizen of Columbus, Ohio, now in charge of constructing the first railroad in Persia, despatched to his mother, Mrs. J. W. O'Connor, in Columbus, Ohio. It was printed inconspicuously in the Ohio State Journal...
There follow in rapid succession the Vale of Tempe, the summit of Parnassus, scaling the Acropolis at midnight, wooing the Maidens of the Porch by Attic moonlight, swimming the Hellespont, climbing Stromboli and Vesuvius, trying to swim from whirling Charybdis to rocky Scylla, singing "Funiculi, Funicula" in the Blue Grotto to an English girl with an Alice-blue Rolls-Royce, climbing Aetna, playing Ulysses ("handsome, heaven-sent Greek") to a 65-year-old bobbed grandmother's Calypso, and reading "The Return of Ulysses" at Ithaca, having completed what was begun, a trip in the wandering wake of Ulysses doing...
...chapter containing the least Halliburton relates a visit to Rupert Brooke's grave at Skyros. Of all the Playboy's heroes, Poet Brooke seems to be the most genuine. But Poet Byron comes a close second: "Lord Byron once wrote that he would rather have swum the Hellespont than written all his poetry. So would...
...hundreds of thousands of U. S. clubwomen already know, Playboy Halliburton did swim the Hellespont, to catch up with Byron and Leander. And the dourest male skepticism will be disarmed by our hero's frank confessions that he took a taxi over the last seven miles of his race from Marathon to Athens in the very tracks of Pheidippides; that diving for sponges in the Gulf of Gabes gave him an earache...