By this time I had become the recognized official protector of the Cretans, although I had always done my best to discourage hostilities and persuade the Cretans to leave their wrongs to diplomatic treatment; not that I had great faith in that, but because I could see no hope for a success for the insurrection. Around me had spontaneously formed an efficient service for information, the runners of the various sections coming to me at Kalepa with the earliest information on every event of importance, and I communicated with the legations at Athens and our own minister at Constantinople. The exactness of my news was so well recognized that even the grand vizier sent regularly to our minister for information, remarking that he got nothing reliable from his own officials. Now happened one of those curious cases of mysterious transmission of news which have often been known in the East. Arkadi was at least forty miles, as the roads go, from Kalepa,--a long day's journey as travel goes there; but I received news of the fight soon after it began, and information of the progress of the combat during the day, one of my customary informants coming every few hours with the details. This service I subsequently checked by the information given me by Mustapha's Cretan secretary, who lived in the house next to mine at Kalepa, and by the accounts given by some Italian officers of the Turkish and Egyptian regulars engaged in the siege for the final struggle, and found to be correct. I believe the account which I gave the world by the next post, and which was the only complete one ever given, is as near the true history as history is ever told.