"What is it they are yelling all the time?" Curtis asked himself repeatedly, "and what are they singing? Tra-la-la, tra-la-la la!" he was humming the tune himself. A certain pride prevented his seeking information from the hotel proprietor or of one of the officious couriers. He had been no mean Grecian at Harvard, and had read "Loukes Laras" in the modern vernacular. He could speak modern Greek fairly well with the fruit men of Boston. He would solve the mystery himself. And he did. It came to him like a revelation. Three words, scrawled or printed, began to appear on all the whitewashed fences and walls of the city. With some difficulty he found a copy sufficiently plain for a foreigner to read: "_Zeto ho polemos_"--"Hurrah for War!" Then he listened again. Ten minutes later he was in the midst of a swaying, struggling throng before the palace shouting "_Zeto ho polemos!_" At dinner he heard his waiter humming the tune that seemed on the lips and in the heart of the whole world, and he asked, "What are you singing?" The boy, with eyes blazing, recited in Greek two or three stanzas that sent a chill to the roots of Curtis' hair: I know thee by the lightning Of thy terrible swift brand; I know thee by the brightening When thy proud eyes sweep the land! From the blood of the Greeks upspringing Who died that we might be free, And the strength of thy strong youth bringing-- Hail, Liberty, hail to thee! It was the grand war hymn of Solomos, one of those songs that march down the years, fighting like a thousand men for liberty. Curtis was twenty-two, and imagined himself an ancient Greek or a Lord Byron. He would get into this thing somehow. He went back to the hotel and thought it over, and then he discovered that he had been carried away by excitement. "I'm crazy," he said; "I'd have gone anywhere with those chaps, and the fact of the matter is, I ought to be in Jerusalem at this minute. I've overstayed my time here four days now." But his enthusiasm for the Greeks and their cause would not down. There had been another massacre of Christians in Crete and the king had sent Colonel Vassos with an army to seize the island in the cause of humanity. Prince George had followed soon after with the torpedo squadron. "I'd be a chump to enlist as a common soldier," thought Curtis; "besides, I couldn't do much good that way, and the governor never would give me money enough to fit out a company with." Then he thought of the book. "I have it!" he cried. "I will show up this Cretan question to the whole civilized world. I'll get right out among the people. I'll describe them as they are--their manners and customs. I'll see some of these villages that the Turks have burned, and I'll get a lot of stories of outrages from the peasants themselves. I'll touch the thing up, too, with history and poetry."