Here I met again an old Cretan friend, Server Pasha, sent to try the same silly, futile tactics which so failed in Crete, i.e. offering the insurgents elaborate paper reforms in exchange for actual submission. He reminded me of the reply of the local commandant of the army at Mostar when one of the consuls remonstrated at the authorities having taken no action in a case of peculiarly brutal assassination in the city of Mostar, the author of which had not even been arrested. The Colonel Bey replied, astonished, to the indignant consul, "Why, haven't we made a report?" The case was rather a peculiar one: a young Mussulman, having received a present of a new rifle, went out into the suburbs, and, seeing a Christian boy gathering the grapes from his mother's vineyard, took a pot shot at him and shot him through the body. The young assassin was carried in triumph about the town on the shoulders of his playmates, and was never in any way punished for the crime. I had the story from the surgeon who attended the Christian boy, and from Mr. Holmes. I took a keen delight in illuminating the intelligent mind of Server Pasha as to the true condition of the country, telling him what I had seen and reported to the "Times;" and, as he knew me well, and that I was trustworthy in my reports,--for he knew how A'ali Pasha had regarded me,--he was in a curious state of mental distress. On his report to Constantinople, the consul-general at Ragusa, an Italian Levantine called Danish Effendi, whom I had also known at Syra in the old days, was ordered to make an investigation into the Popovo atrocities, and, being under the eyes of a large body of correspondents and a Christian public, he reported confirming my report.