My father, never notable for the agreeable qualities of discretion and reticence, soon spread about the report of his discovery of the green carnation. He could not resist boasting of it in his cups, of the formula with which he could always make them, of the fortune he must inevitably make. Nor did he hesitate to taunt the men of the valley, they who came of generations of flower-growers, with his own success in an occupation which, he said, he had never undertaken but at a woman’s persuasion, since it could be regarded as manly only by those who would describe as manly the painted face of a Circassian eunuch. Thus he would taunt them, laughing me to scorn when I ventured to point out that even worms will turn and cravens conspire. Woe and woe to the dour and high-handed in a world of polity, for their fate shall surely find them out! One day, having been to the village to procure some yeast for the making of a _yaourt_ or _yawort_, which is that same Bulgarian “sour milk” so strongly recommended to Anglo-Saxon digestions, I was startled, as I walked up the path to the door, by the bruit of loud rough voices. Only too soon was my fear turned to horror. One of the voices was my father’s, arrogant and harsh as only his could be, with a sneer like a snake running through it. The other I could not recognise, but could hear only too well that it had not the soft accents of the men of the valley; and when, afraid to enter, I peered in through the window, I saw my father in violent altercation with a man his equal in stature and demeanour--another bearded giant, as fair as my father was dark, and with the livid eyes of a wolf. What was my horror on recognising him as Michaelis the _comitadji_, the notorious and brutal Michaelis of the hills. The Michaelises and the Samsonovitch Samsonoffs had always been the equal kings of the _banditti_ and, in many a fight between Christian and Turk, the equal champions of the Cross against the Crescent. And now, as I could hear through the window, the last of the Michaelises was asking of the last of the Samsonoffs some of his great wealth, that he might arm and munition his troop to the latest mode.