the enjoyment of her high protection; an unscrupulous scoundrel, who had grafted on his Greek duplicity all the worst traits of the Turk.  As, with the exception of the Italian consul, Sig.  Colucci, not one of the persons with whom I acted or came in contact in my official residence survives, unless it may be the commander of the Assurance, an English gunboat, of whose subsequent career I know nothing, I shall treat them all without reserve.

The Pasha, Ismael, I at once found, considered it his policy to provoke a conflict with any new consul, and either break him in or buy him over; and the occasion for a trial of strength was not long coming.  The night patrol attempted to arrest the son of the vice-consul in his house, in which I had been temporarily residing while the house which I took was being put in order, and over which the flag floated.  I at once demanded an apology, and a punishment for the mulazim in command of the patrol.  The pasha refused it, and I appealed to Constantinople.  The Porte ordered testimony to be taken concerning the affair, and the pasha took that of the mulazim and the policeman on oath, and then that of my witnesses without the oath, the object being, of course, to protest against their evidence on the ground that they would not swear to it.  I immediately had their evidence retaken on oath and sent on to Constantinople with the rest.  The Porte decided in my favor, and ordered the apology to be made by the mulazim.  As the affair went on with much detail of correspondence between the konak and the consulate for some weeks, it had attracted the general attention of our little public, and the final defeat of the pasha was a mortification to him which he made every effort to conceal.  He denied for several weeks having received any decision from the Porte, in the hope, probably, that he would tire me out; but as I had nothing to do, and the affair amused me, I stuck to him as tenaciously as he to his denials, and he had to give in.  It was a very small affair, but the antagonism so inaugurated had a strong effect on the Cretans, who found in me an enemy of their tyrant.

Ismael was cruel and dishonorable; he violated his given word and pledges without the slightest regard for his influence with the population.  I have since seen a good deal of Turkish maladministration, and I am of the opinion that more of the oppression of the subject populations is due to the bad and thieving instincts of the local officials than directly to the Sublime Porte, and that the simplest way of bringing about reforms (after the drastic one of abolishing the Turkish government) is in the Powers asserting a right of approbation of all nominations to the governorships throughout the whole empire.  When, as at certain moments in the long struggle of which I am now beginning the history, I came in contact with the superior officers of the Sultan, I found a better sense of the policy of justice than obtained with the provincial functionaries.