been her chief care.  The quiet but indomitable courage with which she faced danger in Crete, lest they should be involved in the panic which prevailed all around us, was as remarkable as the humility with which she repelled all acknowledgment of any merit on her part.  She indulged in no sentiment, had no poetic prepossession concerning the people she protected and worked for, but the dominant sense of duty carried her through all difficulties.  She never gave a thought to personal danger, and though a fragile creature, not five feet high, she was capable of cowing the most brutal of the barbarians who were gathered around us at Khalepa, and, whether to keep the consulate for me while I was away, or to navigate the yacht to meet me on my return from my visits to Greece, nothing made her hesitate to do what she thought her duty.  In the three years of almost breaking strain of our residence in the midst of the anarchy of the insurrection, she had only the few days’ relief from anxiety of her stay in Syra, while waiting the arrival of the Kestrel, but in all that time I never saw her make the least display of trepidation or anxiety, until the dispatch came from Secretary Washburn to tell us that the salary would be stopped.

I was asked then, as the reader may ask now, why I did not take her away when I found that she was failing.  I had not the means to pay my passage to any other country.  I was myself nearly prostrated mentally and physically, and unfit for anything but my photography.  I was in debt so deeply that I could not honestly borrow, and my brother was dead.  The American government pays no traveling expenses for its consuls, and I had not an article that I could sell for a dollar, for the furniture of the little house we lived in had been provided by the Cretan committee.  The Greek government was hostile to me until Laura’s death stirred the public feeling so profoundly, but even then the king was bitterly opposed to me.  I was physically and financially a wreck on a foreign strand, with neither hope nor the prospect of relief.  I struggled along as best I could, Mrs. Dickson taking charge of my children, and I made my home with the Dicksons.

In June I had to go back to Crete to make consignment of the consulate to my successor.  I found the island materially as I had left it, but almost deserted and quite desolate, and the local administration in the hands of the spies and the traitors of the insurrection; all the brave men in exile and the gloom of death over everything; villages still unrebuilt, and the only sign of activity the building in the most accessible districts of military roads and blockhouses.  As my successor delayed, I, to pass the time, went to Omalos to carry out the ancient plan which could no longer be postponed if it was to be carried out, for I never intended to see Crete again.  The new governor-general—­Mehmet Ali, the Prussian (in subsequent years murdered in Albania)—­was an amiable, just, and intelligent man, who would have