I cannot tell you the story just as Nikola told it to me, with all that flow of language common in a Greek, my memory is not good enough for that; but the facts, and some of his quaint expressions, I can recount, for these I never shall forget. My travel took me to a distant island of the Greek Archipelago, called Sikinos, last winter, an island only to be reached by a sailing-boat, and here, in quarters of the humblest nature, I was storm-stayed for five long days. Nikola had been my muleteer on an expedition I made to a remote corner of the island where still are to be traced the ruins of an ancient Hellenic town, and about a mile from it a temple of Pythian Apollo. He was a fine stalwart fellow of thirty or thereabouts; he had a bright intelligent face, and he wore the usual island costume, namely, knickerbocker trousers of blue homespun calico, with a fulness, which hangs down between the legs, and when full of things, for it is the universal pocket, wabbles about like the stomach of a goose; on his head he wore a faded old fez, his feet were protected from the stones by sandals of untanned skin, and he carried a long stick in his hand with which to drive his mule. Sikinos is perhaps the most unattainable corner of Europe, being nothing but a barren harborless rock in the middle of the Ægean sea, possessing as a fleet one caique, which occasionally goes to a neighboring island where the steamer stops, to see if there are any communications from the outer world, and four rotten fishing boats, which seldom venture more than a hundred yards from the shore. The fifteen hundred inhabitants of this rock lead a monotonous life in two villages, one of which is two hundred years old, fortified and dirty, and called the “Kastro,” or the “camp”; the other is modern, and about five minutes’ walk from the camp, and is called “the other place”; so nomenclature in Sikinos is simple enough. The inhabitants are descended from certain refugees who, two hundred years ago, fled from Crete during a revolution, and built the fortified village up on the hillside out of the reach of pirates, and remained isolated from the world ever since. Before they came, Sikinos had been uninhabited since the days of the ancient Greeks. The only two men in the place who have travelled—that is to say, who have been as far as Athens—are the Demarch, who is the chief legislator of the island, and looked up to as quite a man of the world, and Nikola, the muleteer.