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In all their troubles the Greeks never quite lost heart. The merchants
who had thriven in trade sent their sons to be educated in France,
Russia, and Germany, and these learned to think much of the great old
deeds of their forefathers, and they formed a secret society among
themselves, called the _Hetaira_, which in time the princes and nobles of
the Peloponnesus joined; so that they felt that if they only were so
united and resolute as to make some Christian power think it worth while
to take up their cause in earnest, they really might shake off the
Turkish yoke.

In 1820, Ali Pasha, the governor of Albania, rebelled, and shut himself
up in the town of Yanina, stirring up the Greeks to begin fighting on
their own account, so as to prevent the Sultan from using all his power
to crush him. So the Greeks began, under Prince Ipsilanti, who had
served in the Russian army, to march into the provinces on the Danube;
but they were not helped by the Russians, and were defeated by the Turks.
Ipsilanti fled into Austria; but another leader, called George the
Olympian, lived a wild, outlaw life for some years longer, but as he had
no rank the Greeks were too proud to join him. At last he shut himself
up in the old convent of Secka, and held it out against the Turks for
thirty-six hours, until, finding that he could defend it no longer, he
put a match to the powder, and blew himself and his men up in it rather
than surrender.

But the next year there was another rising all over Greece. The peasants
of Attica drove the Turkish garrison out of all Athens but the Acropolis;
the Suliots rose again, with secret encouragement from Ali Pasha, and
hope seemed coming back. But when Omar Pasha had been sent from
Constantinople with 4000 Turkish troops, he found it only too easy to
rout 700 Greeks at Thermopylae, and, advancing into Attica, he drove back
the peasants, and relieved the Turkish garrison in the Acropolis, which
had been besieged for eighty-three days; but no sooner had he left the
place than the brave peasants returned to the siege.

The worst of the Greeks was that they were very cruel and treacherous,
and had very little notion of truth or honour, for people who have been
long ground down are apt to learn the vices of slaves; and when the Turks
slaughtered the men, burnt the villages, and carried off the women, they
were ready to return their savage deeds with the like ferocity, and often
with more cu