lm and an olive tree, and beyond which the
khan (also serving as custom-house), a two-story house of the Venetian
days, relieves the dreary white with a wash of ochre, stained and
streaked to any tint almost. A little nearer the bottom of the port is
an old Venetian gate, which once shut the Marina in at night while the
custom-house guard slept, and over the keystone of which the Lion of St.
Mark's still turns his mutilated head to the sea.

On the whole, the look of the thing was not unpicturesque, except for
the hopeless whiteness and shabbiness of the principal architectural
features, and especially the "Konak" (palace), which was, beyond all
disguise of light or circumstance, an eyesore and a nuisance, the more
so that its foundations were fine old brown stone masonry, delicious in
color, solid, and showing at one end a pointed arched vault, with its
portward end fallen down to show the interior, and crowned with an
enormous mass of cactus. On the south side, invisible from the port, are
three fine Gothic windows, now filled up, but preserving the traceries.
The palace could scarcely have had a nobler site, or the site a more
ignoble occupancy.

Too late for pratique, we had nothing to do but turn in early, and get
ready to go ashore at sunrise.

Once landed, I began to wish that the comparison I had drawn for the
Konak was a more just one, and that inside its card-board classicalism
could be found the slightest approach to American hospitality. Not an
inn of any kind exists in Canea: a dirty, dingy restaurant, which called
itself "The Guest-House of the Spheres," offered one small bedroom,
which the filth of the place, with its suggestions of bugs and fleas,
forbade the title of a sleeping-room. While the yacht stayed I had a
bed; but after that it was a dreary prospect for a man who had intended
living at his ease in his inn the rest of the summer. And here let me,
once for all, give due credit to Crete, and say that, though there is
not from one end of the island to the other an inn, the stranger will
never wait long, even in the smallest village, to know where he may
sleep, and will rarely find a greater difficulty than to reconcile the
rival claims to the honor of his presence. In my case, I had no greatly
prolonged anxiety, and accepted the proffered hospitality of Mr. Alexis,
then Vice-Consul of the United States of America, and now Dutch Consul,
to whom most of the few travellers in Crete are more or less