saved the position if he had been there in the beginning, but now there was nothing to be done.  When he learned that I intended to go to Omalos he decided, with a more friendly impulse than any governor of Crete had ever shown towards me, to join me there and make the visit pleasant for me.  He preceded me, in fact, and I found the posts all warned to show me the customary honors, and when I reached the plain I found his tent ready to entertain me.  The most sumptuous dinner his resources afforded was served in his audience tent; we had a grand acrobatic and dramatic entertainment of the soldiers and a torchlight retraite, and he gave me rugs to cover me, without which I must have suffered severely, for, though in June, it was bitterly cold at Omalos, and I had brought only one rug to sleep on.  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.  I told him freely what I thought of the situation, and he so far agreed with me that he begged me to go to Constantinople and lay my ideas before A’ali Pasha, promising to support them.

On my return to Athens I raised money enough to get a return ticket to the Turkish capital, and had an immediate audience of the grand vizier, to whom I stated frankly, and without in the least disguising the faults committed by his government, the condition of the island as I saw it, and the remedies necessary for the restoration of its prosperity.  He asked me to give him a written memorandum of my views, which I did, and he then asked me to stay in Constantinople until he could send a commission to Crete and get a report from it.  I replied that I had not the means to stay so long, the time he indicated being several weeks, and he offered to pay my expenses liberally if I would stay.  I went to the office of the “Levant Herald” to ask for work.  They knew me well enough there, for I had been their correspondent from Crete, and the journal had once been fined £100 for one of my letters, and once confiscated for another.  On what I earned I lived for the time I had to wait for the report of the commission.

When the report came I was summoned to the grand vizier to receive my reply.  A’ali Pasha said that he had found that my statements of the condition of things in the island were correct, and he approved the remedies I proposed; would I go out to Crete with full powers to carry out the measures I recommended, the chief of which was an amnesty for such of the exiles as, knowing them personally, I could trust to carry out my dispositions?  He could not give me an official position under the Turkish government, having been reputed so long as an enemy; but a semi-official position for the definite purpose of the pacification he was prepared to offer me with an adequate salary and appointments, and carte blanche for the