hospitable, a more sober, a more chaste, truthful, and loyal
creature than the citizen Turk, I confess that I should like to meet
him. If there is anywhere to be found a man more devoted to duty,
braver, simpler, gentler than the common soldier of the Turkish army, I
would walk a long way to find him.

While the war went on, half of the men who sent the news of it out to
the civilised world found the Turk _anathema maranatha_, and the other
half were persuaded that the Bulgarian was a beast altogether despicable
and cowardly. Since the Bulgarians have had a chance to govern
themselves they have amply disproved that unfavourable theory, and 'the
unspeakable Turk,' of whom we heard so much in those days, was in the
main as good a sort of fellow as might be found in Europe.

The atrocities which shocked the world were, without exception, the work
of the auxiliaries--the Tchircasse, the Bashi-Bazouk, the Zeibeck, the
Smyrniote and Tripolite. I claim to know something of the doings of
these gentry, for Mr. Francis Francis (then representing the _Times_)
and myself were for six weeks the only Englishmen in what was known
as the 'Roumelian atrocity district.' Day after day we lived among the
Christian dead, night after night we saw the incendiary fires. From the
heights of the lower Balkans--as at Sopot--we could see the horizon red.
The deserted villages stank with the unburied bodies of men and animals.
About them in the night-time hordes of vagabond dogs howled lugubriously
in the dark.

It was wonderful and terrible to see how the old savage Eastern spirit
could revive itself in these modern days--'Kill, slay! leave not one
stone standing upon another.' In Kalofer, where there had been a busy
and thriving population a fortnight before our arrival, there was not a
creature left, and scarcely a wall on the summit of which one might
not have laid one's hand. The town still sent up a melancholy smoke to
heaven as we entered it late in the evening, and the last torch of war
shone from a thatched roof at the uttermost limit of the place against
the lowering darkness of the sky. The arabajee who drove the lumbering
little vehicle in which our few belongings were stored fell upon his
knees in the middle of the stony desert street, and delivered to mean
impassioned address of which I could not make out one syllable. My
dragoman translated for my benefit 'Man with the two sweet eyes,' said
the kneeling orator, in possible tribute