sacrificing the interests of Greece to the demands of the Russian ministry in 1868, the King threw away the only opportunity which Greece has ever had of attaining the position her people and her friends believed her destined to,--that of the heir of the Ottoman empire. The case is now hopeless, for the adverse influences have gained the upper hand, and the demoralization of Greece has progressed with the years. The sturdy independence of Comoundouros in 1868 was wasted, and I can imagine that the old man understood that, though the forms of independence and the semblance of progress must be kept up, there was really no hope of a truly Hellenic revival, and with his hopes and his courage he lost all his patriotic ambitions. In this juncture he was satisfied with the husks which the diplomats threw to Greece, and blustered and threatened war to attain a compromise which should keep him in office and in peace with the King, whom he would gladly have rid Greece of if it had been practicable. In the struggle with diplomacy he so far gained his point that there was an adjustment of the frontiers in accordance with the treaty. The commission for the delimitation, at the head of which was General Hamley, met at Athens with the intention of beginning the trace from the Epirote side, and I had made all my preparations for accompanying it, when there happened one of those curious mischances which are possible only in the East. The summer was hot and dry, and the mayor of Athens, foreseeing a drought, had decided to turn the stream known as the "washerwoman's brook," one of the few perennial sources in the vicinity, into the aqueduct which supplied the city with drinking water. As all the dirty clothes of Athens, comprising those of the military hospital, in which there were grave cases of typhoid, were washed in that stream, the consequences were soon evident in a great outbreak of the malady in the city, the victims being estimated at 10,000 persons; and, two days before that on which the commission was to start on its work, I was taken ill. I sent for a doctor and he declared the illness to be fever, and probably typhoid. I went to bed, and took for three days in succession forty grains of quinine a day, getting up on the fourth, to find the commission gone and myself in no condition to follow it; and so I missed the most interesting journey which had ever offered itself in my journalistic career. My exasperation at the imbecility of the mayor can be easily imagined, and it was vented in a proper castigation in my correspondence. In the burning weeks that followed, the state of Athens reminded one of Boccaccio's description of Florence in the plague. There were not physicians enough in the city to attend the sick, or undertakers to bury the dead. The funeral processions to the great cemetery beyond the Ilissus seemed in constant motion, and the water-sellers drove a brisk trade in the water of a noble spring under Hymettus.