never permitting his antagonisms to degenerate to animosities.  In the years when I first knew him, during the Cretan insurrection of 1866, he was at his best in power and in patriotism; but during the years which followed, full of the base intrigues which had their birth in the influences surrounding the court, he got more or less demoralized, for patriotism and honesty were no passports to power, and he was ambitious before all things.  Not to be in office or near coming to office is in Greece to have no political standing whatever, and the King’s defection and betrayal of the interests of Greece in 1868 convinced Comoundouros and many others that with the King there was nothing to be done for a purely Hellenic and consistent policy.  All my study of Levantine politics since that day convinces me that in sacrificing the interests of Greece to the demands of the Russian ministry in 1868, the King threw away the only opportunity which Greece has ever had of attaining the position her people and her friends believed her destined to,—­that of the heir of the Ottoman empire.  The case is now hopeless, for the adverse influences have gained the upper hand, and the demoralization of Greece has progressed with the years.  The sturdy independence of Comoundouros in 1868 was wasted, and I can imagine that the old man understood that, though the forms of independence and the semblance of progress must be kept up, there was really no hope of a truly Hellenic revival, and with his hopes and his courage he lost all his patriotic ambitions.  In this juncture he was satisfied with the husks which the diplomats threw to Greece, and blustered and threatened war to attain a compromise which should keep him in office and in peace with the King, whom he would gladly have rid Greece of if it had been practicable.

In the struggle with diplomacy he so far gained his point that there was an adjustment of the frontiers in accordance with the treaty.  The commission for the delimitation, at the head of which was General Hamley, met at Athens with the intention of beginning the trace from the Epirote side, and I had made all my preparations for accompanying it, when there happened one of those curious mischances which are possible only in the East.  The summer was hot and dry, and the mayor of Athens, foreseeing a drought, had decided to turn the stream known as the “washerwoman’s brook,” one of the few perennial sources in the vicinity, into the aqueduct which supplied the city with drinking water.  As all the dirty clothes of Athens, comprising those of the military hospital, in which there were grave cases of typhoid, were washed in that stream, the consequences were soon evident in a great outbreak of the malady in the city, the victims being estimated at 10,000 persons; and, two days before that on which the commission was to start on its work, I was taken ill.  I sent for a doctor and he declared the illness to be fever, and probably typhoid.  I went to bed, and took for three days