complexions. Larissa swarms with negroes, children and grandchildren of liberated slaves: many also have been brought here as slaves and have purchased their liberty or claimed it of late years from the authorities and foreign consuls in virtue of slave-trade treaties and recent legislation; while not a few are still in bondage. But it is only fair to say that Larissa is not viewed at its best from either the Volo or the Salonica roads. As in other and fairer cities, the fashionable quarter of Larissa is the west end. There the Salemvria rolls its lazy, yellowish-green waters under a Byzantine bridge of five handsome spans; a few trees grow along its banks; and above them, on a solitary hillock, a picturesque old mosque, bedomed and beminareted, rising almost side by side with the Greek cathedral and the palace of the Despot or Archbishop of Larissa, two or three Government buildings, and a quaint, square clock-tower of Latin construction, form an imposing group, over which looms in the far distance the cleancut angular peak of Ossa. Should the traveller wish to carry away with him a favourable impression of Larissa, let him halt here when the

last flush of sunset still lingers over the scene, and not court disenchantment by passing across the threshold of the town. Crooked, straggling streets, ill paved, and studded with yawning pits and pools of stagnant water; rows of mudwalls; dirty, rickety bazaars, stocked with the refuse of the Manchester and Vienna markets,— form an ensemble than which none more dreary can well be found in the whole length and breadth of the Ottoman empire. Verily, if its name be correctly interpreted to mean "The Brilliant," what a falling off is here since the days when it deserved its title!

Yet Larissa is the capital of one of the richest provinces of the empire; it counts between 20,000 and 25,000 souls; it is the residence of high civil and military functionaries; it is the central entrepôt of the grain trade of the Thessalian plains; among its inhabitants are to be found some of the wealthiest landowners in Turkey; and even in the humblest homesteads there is a degree of ease and comfort which would raise envy in many another country. But the incubus of Turkish misrule has paralysed all wholesome activity and checked all

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desire for improvement, and under the present circumstances the Turkish authorities have other things to think of besides reforms and public works. Every nerve has to be strained to prepare for the threatened campaign. Though, at the time of my visit, the forces collected in Thessaly were not numerically imposing (indeed they were weaker than a few months before, as a large number of time-expired soldiers, whose grumbling, or worse than grumbling, at long years of unpaid service, threatened to spread disaffection among the troops, had been weeded out and sent back to their homes, and their places not yet filled), the first and second ban of the reserves have since been called out, and Turkey must now have a seasoned army of 40,000 men under arms in the province. But the real difficulties with which the Government has to grapple are of another and more stubborn order-viz., financial and administrative. Thessaly, as I before stated, is one of the richest provinces of the empire. In good years its crops of wheat, barley, Indian corn, and tobacco alone represent more than a million sterling. The tithes and muttons (as the tax on live stock

is called) bring in 200,000 liras, and the local expenditure has been cut down within such narrow limits that the provincial revenue shows an annual surplus of 250,000 liras. Yet withal, the province is practically bankrupt. Constantinople devours all its wealth, and leaves to it only the burden of its debts. The sale of Crown property has been going on briskly since last summer. The principal purchaser has been Abram Pasha, the agent of the ex-Khedive at Constantinople, who is rapidly becoming one of the wealthiest landowners in Turkey. Large estates have also passed into the hands of native Greeks, as well as of Greeks from the Hellenic kingdom. Nearly half a million has been paid. by the purchasers, but the provincial exchequer remains empty as heretofore, for the Porte swallows up every farthing of the purchase-money. To Government contractors alone the authorities at Larissa owed in October last 150,000 liras; and so absolutely had the uncertainty of the political situation and the unscrupulous financial measures of the present Grand Vizier destroyed the last vestige of local credit, that, instead of selling, as usual, the proceeds of the

tithes (which are collected in kind), the Government was obliged to keep them in store in order to have wherewithal to feed the troops. Already maize was being served out to them in lieu of rice, because the contractors refused to renew the supplies on any terms save cash, and cash there was none to give.

In Larissa itself the Greeks are in a minority, the proportion being about 13,000 Moslems to 8000 Greeks and 3000 Jews. But in the whole district of Larissa-albeit that Larissa is, of all the districts of Thessaly, the one in which the Moslem or Turkish element is most strongly represented the proportions are more than reversed. The following is a table of the populations of Thessaly compiled from the most trustworthy sources :