Damascus, his heart rapidly warmed towards me, and he apologised with touching simplicity for his rudeness. He had been brought up from his childhood in a tekkeh or monastery in Bulgaria; but during the Russian war the Christians of a neighbouring village had burned his tekkeh and murdered his father and mother, and he himself had been obliged to take refuge in flight. I somewhat warmly disclaimed, both in my own name and in that of Christians in general, all responsibility for such outrages; upon which he gravely took both my hands in his, and fixing his deep-sunk, fervent eyes on mine, bade me, if my words were true, welcome in the name of God. My words were true; but the earnest voice and searching look of the Dervish of Elassona have often haunted me since, both awake and sleeping, with their pitiful reproach.

After our visitors had been despatched, the evening meal was produced, and we soon dispersed to seek our several quarters for the night. Mine had been selected in one of the Christian houses of the town. But I was not yet to enjoy my rest. No sooner had I installed myself than the premises were invaded by the

Christian townsfolk, who evidently looked upon the jaded traveller as a mere machine for dispensing news, and were anxious to sound him upon certain points which they had not ventured to raise in the presence of the Turkish Pasha. The rumour had got abroad that I was a British Government official charged with the task of preparing for the transfer to Greece of the territories awarded to her by the Conference of Berlin. Though I vehemently disclaimed the invidious honour, my denial was received with scarcely disguised incredulity, and almost fierce were the queries as to how soon they were to become Greeks. But albeit the Hellenic influence was strengthened by the presence of two Greek priests, there was not, I confess, the general enthusiasm at the prospective change which I had been led in certain quarters to anticipate. The majority of my uninvited guests were Wallachs, and annexation to Greece meant in their eyes freedom. from Turkish rule, and, so far, a blissful consummation. But the national feeling was strong among them. "We are a small nation," one of their spokesmen said, "and can scarcely

hope for independence: therefore, better be deperdent upon the Greeks, whose tongue we understand and whose faith we share, than on Turks, who are strangers and spoilers in the land; but Wallachs we shall always remain."

And this I hereafter found to be the prevailing feeling throughout the Wallach country. In the towns and larger villages, especially where priestly influence is strong, Hellenism is the fashion bred of preaching and of education; but it is not deeply rooted. Among the people, especially among the peasantry and the shepherd tribes, there is a strong national pride.

Among the mountain shepherds there is even a secret fear of annexation to Greece, which the Turkish authorities have not been slow to work upon. Most of them are nomads, who, as soon as the winter snows settle down upon the mountains, leave their summer alps and drive their flocks down into the plains of Thessaly. Were Thessaly in other hands than Turkish, they are afraid of being cut off from these pasture-lands, which would soon be redeemed for cultivation by more civilised and industrious owners. of their shepherd patriarchs said to me--" God

One

gives us the mountain alps for our flocks in summer, and in winter the Government gives us the waste lands of the plain. What more could the King of Greece do for us?" In the villages which have suffered more from Turkish oppression, it is the fear of military service, to which they are not liable under Turkish rule, which damps their Hellenic sympathies. And beneath all these motives of selfinterest there lurks the consciousness of a distinct origin and vague national aspirations. At the present moment they are too poor and cowed to assert themselves. But should they receive encouragement and assistance from without, should the Roumanians be allowed time to push the propaganda which they have already initiated among them, I should not be surprised to see a Wallachian national movement spring up in these regions as strong and as unexpected, though perhaps just as little spontaneous, as, for instance, the Albanian movement. True, the whole power of the Greek clergy would be arrayed against it; but the Bulgarians have already shown that among the populations of this peninsula, notwithstand

ing ignorance and superstition, the pride of race, when once roused, bursts even the bonds of religious tutelage.

Dawn was just brightening into daylight as our horses clattered through the streets of Elassona and scaled the precipitous cliffs which rise like a wall over the last houses of the town. A narrow gorge, cleft by a mountain torrent, leads to the brow of this second ridge, and a more lovely view than that which awaited us on emerging from the ravine can scarcely be imagined. At our feet lay Elassona, its domes, minarets, and masses of green foliage still wrapped in the morning mist; over against us, on the other side of the defile, a quaint medieval monastery, said to be built on the foundations of an ancient Hellenic fortress ; before us, another stretch of table-land studded with villages, and orchards, and fields of maize, with a double background of purple mountains; and close upon us, on the right, the giant buttresses of Olympus, rising almost sheer from the plain, with dark patches of forest hanging here and there on the flanks of the mountain, and its lofty domes, already crowned with the first