be dismembered, who gave up Hungary in '49 for
want of a stroke of the pen, should have shed
our blood like water in the Crimean war, to
maintain in Europe a race which will always
act as its forefathers acted, whenever it dares.
"The Turk never changes." And yet here have
we been fighting for him; nay (more wonderful
still), here are we now lending him money,
bolstering up his loan, planning public works
for him, as if he were a bonâ fide member of the
European family!

If the Greeks gave no mercy in their struggle
for independence, they got no mercy. The
story of the cave of Melidoni, on the skirts
of the Cretan Ida, has been told several times.
It may be new to some readers. They will
find it given at length in Notes of Travel in
Crete, by G. Perrot: two fresh and interesting
papers in the Revue des Deux Mondes, for
February and March last. Melidoni is one of those
great stalactite caverns, like the famous Antiparos
grotto, or our own Cheddar cave, which
abound in most limestone formations. The softer
part of the rock has got melted out by the
action of water—there must always have been
plenty of water where there are caverns—and so
a space is left, more or less extensive, which
soon gets adorned with limestone icicles, and
pillars, and "organ pipes," and great "curtains"
hanging from the misty roof, and "loaves of
bread," and "a larder full of geese," and all
the other names which the fancy of guides
affixes to stalactites. Of course, when the
war broke out, these caverns were great places
of refuge for the patriots. They put wives and
children there for safety. The vast quarries,
for instance, identified by travellers with the
Labyrinth of Minos, were held by a strong
party. The Turks never dared to attack them.
The party at Melidoni were not so fortunate.
Three hundred and more took refuge there in
the summer of 1822; most of them were old men,
women, and children, with just a few strong men
to guard the narrow entrance. At one place
near the mouth the roof is so low that you
have to creep along on all fours. The three
hundred had provisions, and would have stood
a long siege, had not the Turks (forestalling the
Duke of Malakhoff) got a lot of wood and
straw together, and lighting it one windy day,
managed to fill the cave with dense smoke.
The poor Christians ran into the furthest
recesses, but the smoke followed them, and not
one of the three hundred ever saw daylight
again. The cowardly besiegers lay for over a
fortnight outside, fearing an ambuscade. At
last they made a prisoner go in and "report;"
even after his asseveration, they wait three days
longer, and then go in and strip the slain. Soon
afterwards, six Greeks came to visit Melidoni;
they had put their wives and little children here
to be out of harm's way. "We can imagine the
wretched men's feelings when the three who
had gone in, brought word to the others who
kept watch outside, what was the state of things.
Two of them never recovered the shock, one
dying at once, the other in a week. The
Greeks afterwards got possession of the whole
district, and held a solemn funeral service in
the cave, where the bones still lie on the floor,
getting encased in the fast-growing stalagmite.
We might tell many tales of wanton atrocity on
both sides, but a more gratuitously barbarous
deed than this was never wrought during the
whole war. Let us hope that the island had
never been the scene ot such a horrible deed
since the days of King Minos and the Minotaur,
with his tale of human victims and the strange
"man of bronze," Talos, who would seem, from
a half-worn-out inscription, to have been
worshipped (very probably with human sacrifices)
at this very cave.

Little thought old Tournefort of what a
tragedy this Melidoni, which he tried to see and
could not, would be the scene. He gives us an
amusing instance, in relating how he was baffled
here, of the "Cretising" (alas! in plain Saxon it,
means lying—we remember St. Paul to Titus) of
the Candiote papa, and the bullying of theTurkish
woywode. It seems to have been a concerted plan
between them to extort money from the Frenchmen,
who wanted to look at the cave with its
inscription, and who were also anxious to see
how the gum Ladanum is gathered. After
getting three crowns out of them, one for himself,
two for the Turk, the papa takes them to
the Ladanum mountains, where they see men in
shirt and drawers drawing a machine like a hay-
rake, with a double row of leather thongs instead
of teeth, over the short strong-smelling shrubs
with which the ground is covered. The work
has to be done in the heat of the day, and when
there is no wind to cover the plants with dust.
The hay-rake is an improvement on the old plan
described by Theophrastus: "The Ledon used
to be scraped from the hair and beards of goats
which had been browsing on the plants from
which it exudes." His other wish Tournefort
is unable to gratify; perhaps he does not bribe
enough; perhaps there is really some superstition
connected with the spot, and making it
"dangerous to the state" for a Ghiaour to visit
it. Anyhow, he records the delight with which
he afterwards found the inscription in Gruter,
and "so discovered in the midst of Paris what
baffled me in the island itself." Tournefort,
like most of the writers of his day, accepts
the Turks as an inevitable necessity, merely
occasionally noticing their one virtue, their
honesty. "A Turk convicted of theft is
strangled in prison, that he may not bring
disgrace on the Mahomedan name; he is then
stitched up in a sack full of stones and flung into
the sea." Their punishments are very cruel.
We used to read and re-read, with morbid horror,
the details of impaling, and of the ganche—a
way of drawing a man up by a pulley to the top
of a high scaffold, and then letting him drop down
on a huge hook, from which he hung by
whatever part of his body the hook may have caught.
"Men linger for three days now and then, and
sometimes are so callous as to ask passers-by for
a cigar." Impaling was most dreaded; it was
mainly practised on Cretan exiles who had settled