The occupation of the island of Cyprus by Great Britain in 1878 gave Wauchope a splendid opportunity for the exercise of his talents, not only as a military man, but in the capacity of a civil administrator and judge. The island was taken over from the Turks in July of that year. Their government of it for centuries had been a curse to the people and a curse on the land, and it had lapsed into one of the forgotten spots of God's earth. The advent of British rule proved the beginning of a new era for both its Greek and Turkish population. Endowed with a healthy {59} climate and a fertile soil, Cyprus--once so fruitful and prosperous--may yet rank as one of the most flourishing dependencies of the Crown. It is full of romance, for its lovely scenery and relics of the past well entitle it to be called 'an Enchanted Island.' With mediæval traditions of its occupation by the Crusaders, and with its still older classical reminiscences of the heathen worship of Aphrodite, supplanted by the early conversion of its people to Christianity through the visit of St. Paul, St. Mark, and Barnabas, not to speak of its repeated conquest by Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Venetians, and Turks, there is no more interesting island to be found in the Mediterranean. [Illustration: Captain WAUCHOPE at the Age of 30.] In July 1878 a regiment of Scottish Highlanders was sent to occupy this fair island of the Orient in name of the Queen. The Black Watch from Malta, in the transport _Himalaya_, landed at Larnaka, and were distributed at various points for garrison duty, under the direction of General Sir Garnet Wolseley, as High Commissioner. Wolseley, having divided the island into districts, deputed the civil administration of these to a number of the most skilled of the military officers of the regiment. To Lieutenant Wauchope, then thirty-two years of age, was given, with the title of captain, the charge of the town and district of Papho--the ancient Paphos, where the Apostles' journey through the island closed, and where Elymas the sorcerer was struck blind for a time. As assistant-commissioner Wauchope was well supported by Lieutenant A. G. Duff, a young officer of his company, who furnishes us with some particulars of their duties and difficulties there. The post was anything but a sinecure. He had the superintendence of the revenue under Sir Robert Biddulph, then Financial Commissioner of the island. In this important office he set {60} himself with all the earnestness of his nature to the correction of abuses, the suppression of crime, and the establishment of law and order, out of which only can freedom and security be attained. We have it on the authority of Mr. F. H. Parker, the District Judge of Limasol, that 'not only was he a most efficient governor, but in those days, when Ottoman judges sat in the Daavi (District) Court, he presided as a just and capable judge. Though more than twenty years have elapsed since then, the inhabitants,' he