in succession forty grains of quinine a day, getting up on the fourth, to find the commission gone and myself in no condition to follow it; and so I missed the most interesting journey which had ever offered itself in my journalistic career.  My exasperation at the imbecility of the mayor can be easily imagined, and it was vented in a proper castigation in my correspondence.  In the burning weeks that followed, the state of Athens reminded one of Boccaccio’s description of Florence in the plague.  There were not physicians enough in the city to attend the sick, or undertakers to bury the dead.  The funeral processions to the great cemetery beyond the Ilissus seemed in constant motion, and the water-sellers drove a brisk trade in the water of a noble spring under Hymettus.

At the next municipal election the mayor was reëlected triumphantly!  The ministry was less fortunate, a dissolution resulting in a majority for the opposition, and Tricoupi came into power.  As the most competent and eminent of the rulers of Greece in the following years (for Comoundouros died not long after), and cut off prematurely in the midst of his services to the land he always served with an honest, patriotic devotion, he deserves the commemoration which, as his intimate friend for many years, I am better qualified, perhaps, to render him than any other foreigner.  Our friendship began in the period when he held the portfolio of Foreign Affairs in 1867-8 and continued till his death.  He was educated and, I think, born in London, where his father held for many years the legation of Greece.  The elder Tricoupi and his wife were two of the most sympathetic and admirable people of their race I have ever known, and the elder Tricoupi’s history of his country in its later fortunes is recognized as the standard, both in its history and in its use of the modern Greek, purely vernacular, which we have.  The son, head of the government or leader of the opposition from an age at which in few countries a man can lead in politics, was, rara avis in those lands, an absolutely devoted patriot and honest man; but his country has never been in a state of political education or patriotic devotion such as to enable it to profit by his ability or his honesty.  I well remember that during his first premiership I said to him that I hoped he was in for a long term of office, which might establish some solidity in Greek politics, and he replied, “They will support me until I am obliged to tax them, and then they will turn me out.”  And so it happened.

The general elections, which were stormy, brought Tricoupi into power; but the violence to the freedom of election of which the government was guilty made them very exciting.  One of Tricoupi’s chief supporters was standing for Cephalonia, I think, and we heard that there were great preparations to defeat him by the common device of overawing his supporters and driving them from the polls, and I decided to go at once to the locality and watch the method of the