The equally guilty but powerless Cretans escaped with a sharp rebuke.

Had he stayed in Crete he would not have won this victory; nor the Pythian and Isthmian victories, referred to at the end of the ode, for the Cretans seem to have kept aloof, in an insular spirit, from the Panhellenic games.

He offered all that the Cretans could desire, short of annexation to Greece,an assembly of their own, freedom from taxation for a term of years, a prince of their own election without reserve, and the half of the customs receipts.

They seemed even better for the Cretans than annexation to Greece, and I so represented them to Mr. Morris.

But I received from him the orders of General Ignatieff to urge the Cretans to reject them, as the certain alternative was their independence and annexation to Greece.

A'ali used no arts; he offered bribes to no one; he showed what the Sultan was ready to offer and guarantee, and listened patiently to all that the consuls or the friends of the Cretans said, but it was too late.

I and my veteran cavass, Hadji Houssein, broke through with a guest,Colonel Borthwick, an English officer in the Turkish service,escaping down a breakneck hillside in the dark to save him and his two orderlies from capture by the insurgents, a trifling thing for us who were known as the friends of the Cretans, but a serious matter possibly for Turkish soldiers in fez and uniform.

We made a reckless race down the mountain, leaving our horses and my photographic apparatus under the care of Dickson, and just succeeded in reaching the Turkish outpost in advance of a party of Cretans who followed the road down to cut us off.

At one time I had been confined to the house for three months by a scorbutic malady which prevented my walking, my children had been suffering from ophthalmia brought by the Egyptians, and Laura was in a state of extreme mental depression from her sympathy with the Cretans, while the absolute apathy prevailing in the island made me useless to either side.

I left for Athens in September of 1868, convinced, as were the intelligent chiefs of the Cretans, that the Greek government intended to abandon the insurrection.

The agitation in America on behalf of the Cretans had been pushed too energetically and under bad management, and had been followed by indifference, and the government would willingly have recalled me, but had no pretext for doing so, as I had always obeyed my orders.

The anxiety and mental distress of our Cretan life, and her passionate sympathy with the suffering Cretans, even more than our privations and personal danger, had long been producing their effect on her mind, and the weaning of the baby precipitated the change into a profound melancholy, which became insanity accompanied by religious delusions from which she sought refuge in a voluntary death.

She was given a public funeral, and the government sent a caisson to carry the coffin to the grave, but the Cretans claimed the right to take charge of it, and the coffin was carried to the cemetery on the shoulders of the oldest chiefs.

We returned together next day after I had visited the great ravine of Agios Rumeli, the most magnificent gorge I have ever seen, never taken from the Cretans by an enemy until this betrayal; and, as we went back, we discussed the condition of the island.

From the Mussulmans of the island I had less hostility to endure than from the more influential of the Christian Cretans, with whom the dominant passion of life seemed to be that of intrigue, and with whose mendacity and unscrupulousness I could not contend.

The Cretans are probably the purest remnant of the antique race which resulted from the mixture of Pelasgian, Dorian, Achaian, Ionian, and the best representative of the antique intellect.

Our route brought us through Murnies, celebrated for its orange groves and for the horrible execution of many Cretans by Mustapha Kiritly in the "great insurrection"that of 1837to punish them for assembling to petition the Sultan for relief.

It is one of the most ghastly of all the dreadful incidents of Turkish repressions, for the Cretans, pacifically assembled without arms, were arrested, and all their magnates, for the better repression of discontent and to overawe rebellions to come, were hanged on the orange-trees in such numbers that, as the old consul of Sweden, an eye-witness, told me during my consulate, the orchard was hung with them, and left there to rot.

But the evidence was at hand to show that the pasha himself, finding the islanders no less difficult to control for all the concessions made them, had been obliged in the interest of his own quiet and permanence in government to turn the restlessness of the Cretans into sectional conflicts during which they left him in peaceful possession of his pashalik.

In his eagerness for supremacy he assailed even the Cretans who had come to terms with him, and not heeding their objection that there was a state of truce he hastened to do them harm before Pompey came up.

In this way the Cretans, who had been free through all preceding ages and had never owned a foreign lord, were enslaved; and from their subjugation Metellus obtained his title.

It was this same "accursed Cretan question," as Mr. Venizelos called it, which now drew the country into a military alliance against her Ottoman neighbor who, until too late, refused to make any concession either to the just claims of the Cretans or to the conciliatory proposals of the Greek government.

It is a natural union; for the Cretans are Greeks, undiluted with Turk, Albanian, or Slav blood, though with some admixture of Italian.

Each ended as a rule with a promise of the Sultan to confer upon the Cretans some form of local self-government, with additional privileges, financial or other.

Suffice it to say that the Cretans ultimately went so far as to elect members to sit in the Greek Parliament at Athens, and that Turkey had given notice that their admission to the chamber would be regarded as a casus belli.