In a small room on the north side of the Central
Court was found a curiously quaint and delicate specimen of early
fresco painting--the figure of a Little Boy Blue--more thoroughly
deserving of the title than Gainsborough's famous picture, for,
strangely enough, he is blue in his flesh-tints, picking and placing
in a vase the white crocuses that still dapple the Cretan meadows.
The northern side of the palace was finished with another portico,
and in this part of the building there came to light a series of
miniature frescoes, valuable, not only as works of art, but as
contemporary documents for the appearance, dress, and surroundings
of the mysterious people to whom this great building was once home.
Here were groups of ladies with the conventional white complexion
given by the Minoan artists to their womankind, wonderfully bedizened
with costumes resembling far more closely the evening dress of our own
day than the stately robes of classic Greece with their severe lines.
In their very low-necked dresses, with puffed sleeves, excessively
slender waists, and flounced skirts, and their hair elaborately
dressed and curled, they were as far as possible removed from our
ideas of Ariadne and her maids of honour, and might almost have
stepped out of a modern fashion-plate. 'Mais,' exclaimed a French
savant, on his first view of them, 'Mais ce sont des Parisiennes.
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