The next morning at breakfast we took leave of our General. We were bound for Constantinople and our ship was to sail at noon. He was bound heaven knows whither in search of paragraphs. After breakfast he announced his intention of going up to the citadel of Smyrna. “I am informed,” he told us, “that there air up there some Cyclopean walls. Now Cyclops lived quite a long while ago, and I’m not going to miss seeing what he built.” It was rather a shame to disillusion the poor gentleman, but I thought of the seven across the Atlantic and was stony-hearted. When I explained to him the meaning of Cyclopean building the General was disenchanted, but he went up to the citadel nevertheless, and I have no doubt made a very pretty story out of the great one-eyed builder. * * * * * And now let me go back seven years and start again on Gunpowder Plot Day, 1864, when we left the radiantly beautiful bay of Smyrna for England on board the Austrian Lloyd’s ship _Messina_. Twenty-six hours’ steam brought us to the Island of Syra, where, after being roasted for a day and a night on that sun-scorched rock, where no trace of vegetation is to be seen—to all appearance an island of bumboat-men and evil smells—on the 7th we shipped on board the _Calcutta_, also an Austrian Lloyd’s ship, bound for Trieste. It is something to have seen Navarino and to have passed Ithaca, even in the night; but what gave especial interest to our cruise was meeting Count Ungern Sternberg (or was he a Baron? I forget), a Russian who was a relation of many people whom I had known well in St. Petersburg. Though a general in the army, he was one of those travelling agents who in those days used to wander over Europe apparently charged with no special mission, but keeping their ears and eyes open everywhere, and doubtless finding many an opportunity of rendering some underground service to the rather tortuous policy in which the Russian Foreign Office in those days delighted. Now that the Gortchakoffs and Ignatieffs have carried their diplomacy into another and let us hope a better world, there is perhaps no room for the political knight errant of whom Ungern Sternberg was at that time a rather famous representative. I knew him well by name, though we had never met, and he was a most agreeable companion. We talked a great deal about our common friends in London, Paris, St. Petersburg (I cannot yet bring myself to talk of Petrograd). On politics, for some reason best known to himself, he was, as he would have put it, _très boutonné_; but when we reached Corfu and he saw the remains of the blown-up forts his excitement got the better of his diplomacy, and he could not conceal his joy at the loss which England had sustained, or his wonder at the short-sightedness which prompted it. “What was your Lord Russell about?” he said. “See how many combinations may make England regret this step. For instance, suppose that France and Italy—no