It is good sometimes to transport ourselves
thus, whether in body or in spirit, into the
midst of another kind of civilisation, without
too closely examining whether it be inferior
or superior to ours. All societies have
good features, and it is useful to know what
they are; but, the chief lesson to be learned
from an enlarged view of the manners of
the various peoples of the earth is, that to
all men, in whatever position they may be
placed, are given the materials of happiness,
and that few would exchange with ourselves,
or indeed with any one.

DEMETRIUS THE DIVER

THERE are no bygones that have greater
need to be bygones than those of wickedness,
violence, and cruelty. The blood and dust
that besmear some pages of history might
glue the leaves together for ever. Yet from
time to time necessities will concur that
leave us no choice but to open the old grave;
to turn to the old dark register; to unlock
the old dark, grim skeleton closet; to turn
the retrospective glass towards the bad bold
days that are gone.

We are at present the allies—and worthily
so—of the Turks. A brave people, patient,
high-minded, slow to anger, terrible yet
magnanimous in their wrath. Yet, while
we acknowledge and respect all the good
qualities possessed by this valiant nation, it
is impossible to forget that the Turk has not
always been the complacent Pacha in a
European frock-coat and a sealing-wax cap
with a blue tassel, who writes sensible,
straightforward state papers, reviews
European troops, does not object to a quiet
glass of champagne, and regales English
newspaper correspondents with coffee and
pipes. Nor is he always the sententious,
phlegmatic, taciturn, apathetic Osmanli, who,
shawled and turbaned, sits cross-legged upon
the divan of meditation, smoking the pipe of
reflectiveness; who counts his beads and says
his prayers five times a day, and enjoys his
kef; and who, as to wars and rumours of
wars, fire, famine, pestilence, and slaughter,
says but: " Allah akbar "—God is great.

There are men in London whom we
may meet and converse with in our daily
walks, who can remember the horrible
massacre of Scio, in the year of salvation eighteen
hundred and twenty-two. We had just
begun, through the edifying cobweb-spinning
of diplomacy, the passionate poetry of Lord
Byron and the crude (because badly-informed)
intelligence of the English press, to understand
that there was something between the
Greeks and the Turks in the Morea, the
Peloponnesus, and the Archipelago, and
that the former were not, on the whole, quite
rightly used. We were just going to see about
forming an opinion on these and other matters
when the news of the massacre of Scio burst
upon us like a thunder-clap. Gloomily and
succinctly the frightful news was told us how
the terrible Kara Ali—or the Black—Pacha
had appeared with a fleet and an army in the
harbour of Scio, then one of the fairest,
peacefullest, most prosperous, most densely-
populated islands in the Græco-Turkish
Archipelago, and that all—peaceful rayahs,
gold and purple harvest, university,
commerce, wealth—had in three days disappeared.
The story of the massacre of Scio has never
been fully told in England; and only in so far
as it affects my story am I called upon to
advert to it here. Besides, no tongue could
tell, no pen could describe, in Household
language, a tithe of the atrocities
perpetrated in the defenceless island by order of
the Black Pacha. Suffice it to say that for
three days Scio was drowned in blood; that the
dwellings of the European consuls were no
asylum; that, the swords of the
infuriated Osmanlis murdered alike the white-
headed patriarch, the priest of the family,
the nursing mother, the bride of yesterday,
the bride of that to-morrow which was
never to come to her, the tender suckling and
the child that was unborn. Upwards of
eighteen thousand persons were massacred in
cold blood; and the blackened ruins of Scio
became a habitation for bats and dragons,
howling dogs, and wheeling birds of prey.

Some few miserable souls escaped the
vengeance of Karali Pacha. There is a Greek
ecclesiastic now in London, who was hidden
by his mother in a cave during the massacre,
and brought away unhurt. When the fury
of the invaders began, through lassitude, to
cool, they selected such boys and young
girls as they could find alive, and sent
them to be sold in the slave market at
Constantinople. Then, when they had left the
wretched island to itself, half-famished
wretches began to crawl out of holes and
thickets and ditches, where they had hidden
themselves. They saw the charred and
smouldering remnants of what had been
Scio; but they abode not by them. In an
agony of fear lest the murderers should
return, they made the best of their way
across the seas to other islands—to inaccessible
haunts on the main-land. Those who
had the means took refuge on the French
and Italian shores of the Mediterranean.

There is a sultry city which, if you were
minded to go to it over land, you could have
reached in those days by diligence, as you can
reach it in these, by a commodious railway from
Paris; but, to attain which by sea you must
cross the stormy Bay of Biscay and pass the
rocky Straits of Gibraltar, and coast along
the tideless sea in sight of the shores of
Africa. To this great mart of southern
commerce, with its deep blue sky, its slack-
baked houses, its orange trees, black-eyed,
brown-skinned children, and crowded port,
where floats the strangest medley of ships,
and on the quays of which walk the most
astonishing variety of costumes that ever