In this condition the year 1867 went out and the third year of the insurrection began.  The Greek government sent supplies enough to keep the men under arms from starving, and the Turkish could send no more troops, so that there were only, after garrisoning the fortresses, about 5000 troops available for any operations.  One of the European officers told me that the total force remaining out of eighty-two battalions, of which most had come to Crete full, was 17,000 men effective.  A party of the consuls and officers of the men-of-war in the port made a picnic at Meskla in August, and witnessed a fight between the Cretans and Zurba and the Turks at Lakus, in the course of watching which I had a shot fired at me from the Turkish trenches, which came so near that the lead of the bullet striking a rock at my side spattered me from head to foot, and as we returned to Canea we were surrounded by the insurgents at Theriso, having lost our road in the dark, and most of the party taken prisoners.  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.  The post which we reached was under the command of a major, and Borthwick, who outranked him, ordered out a relieving party to go up the road and rescue the consuls, but the frightened major went up the road, out of sight, and waited there till we were gone, and then came back.  He complained to Borthwick on receiving the order, “But you know that is dangerous,”—­a fair expression of the feeling of the army as to their service at that time.  They were too demoralized to make any impression on the insurgents.

Laura had recently been confined with our Bella, her third child, and our physician—­a kindly and excellent Pole, attached to one of the hospitals—­ordered us all out of the island as soon as she was able to travel, for, to use his expression, “he would not guarantee the life of one of us if we remained in the island two weeks longer.”  We had been living for over two years a life of the deprivations and discomfort of a state of siege.  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.  It was most gratifying to me that A’ali Pasha recognized my good faith