It is strange how San Stefano, in spite of herself, like some light little person involuntarily caught into a tragedy, seems fated to be historic. San Stefano is a suburb on the flat northwestern shore of the Marmora that tries perseveringly to be European and gay. San Stefano has straight streets. San Stefano has not very serious-looking houses standing in not very interesting-looking gardens. San Stefano has a yacht-club whose members, possessing no yachts, spend their time dancing and playing bridge. And a company recently bought land and planted groves on the edge of San Stefano with the idea of making a little Monte Carlo in the Marmora. Whether San Stefano was trying to be worldly and light-minded as long ago as 1203, when Enrico Dandolo stopped there with the men of the fourth crusade, I cannot say—nor does Villehardouin. Another far-come army to stop there was that of the Russians, in 1878, who left not much light-heartedness in San Stefano. In 1909 the events which preceded the fall of Abd ül Hamid turned the yacht-club for a moment into the parliament of the empire, and the town into an armed camp. Turned into an armed camp again at the outbreak of the Balkan War, San Stefano soon became a camp of a more dreadful kind. I did not see San Stefano, myself, at the moment of its greatest horror. When I did go, one cold grey November morning, it was rather unwillingly, feeling myself a little heroic, at all events wanting not to seem too unheroic in the eyes of the war correspondent and the other friend he invited to go. I did not know then, in my ignorance, that cholera can be caught only through the alimentary canal. And my imagination was still full of the grisly stories the war correspondent had brought back from his first visit. There was nothing too grisly to be seen, however, as we landed at the pier. Chiefly to be seen were soldiers, coated and hooded in grey, as usual, who were transferring supplies of different kinds from small ships to the backs of small pack-animals. The correspondent accordingly took out his camera; but he pretended to focus it on us, knowing the susceptibility of Turks in the matter of photography—a susceptibility that had been aggravated by the war. Seeing that the men were interested rather than displeased at his operations, he went about posing a group of them. Unfortunately an enterprising young police sergeant appeared at that moment. He took the trouble to explain to us at length that to photograph soldiers like that, at the pier, with hay on their clothes and their caps askew, was forbidden. People would say, when we showed the prints in our country, “Ha! That is a Turkish soldier!” and get a wrong impression of him. The impression I got was of his size and good looks together with a mildness amounting to languor. I do not know whether those men at the pier had been through the two great battles, or whether the pest-house air of the place depressed them. A Greek who