e
finds the miserable huts either deserted or tenanted by women and old
men. How can these be made to suffer for other men's offences, or forced
to give information which they declare themselves not to possess?

The same dissatisfaction must be confessed with Previsa Salonica, that
place of steady disrespectability, which has maintained its bad
character since the apostolic days, and even with Constantinople. This
last is a gem of the earth, but, its beauties are to a great extent
those of civilised elaboration. Courtiers form but one species, and
breathe pretty much the same atmosphere throughout the world. He who has
studied them throughout the world has marked only the circumstantial
differences of locality producing their effect on a spring of action,
itself one and constant. To search out and know this principle it may be
useful to visit foreign courts; but Man, beyond the exhibition of this
one phase of character, does not flourish in such places. If the best
place of observation be not actually the wilderness, because that too is
as extensive, calling forth necessarily particular energies, and
exhibiting to a great extent one effect, we may take favourable ground
somewhere midway between the extremes. It is to the heart and centre of
a country that we should go for the vigorous current of its life. Here
the colour is vivid, the speciality preserved, the family features of
our brethren distinguishable.

I suppose it was some such profound rumination as this that suggested to
my two friends and myself the idea of the cruise hereinafter to be
recorded. All three were right travel-smitten, a state of mind which
marvellously thrives on slight nourishment. We had had substantial food
in this way, and were proportionately vigorous in enterprise. We had
seen at odd times a good deal of our friends the Turks, but it had been
chiefly of the vagabonds near the coast. Into all sorts of queer creeks
and corners had we found our way in boat expeditions, that most capital
mode of adventure; though rather ticklish for those who are not pretty
strong in numbers. So had we dug into the sinuosities of Greece, of
which both eastern and western borders were familiar to us; and it is
not a little that I would take for my Horace, which I bore with me up
the Ambracian Gulf, and which bears over the "_nunc est bibendum_" the
note of my personal presence off Actium. Pleasant, too, are the
recollections of our visit to Nicopolis, the migh