11. A double-bedded room pays double for itself, save the case where the voyager declares that one bed may be let to another person. It is, however, forbidden to sleep on the floor. I should explain that no insult is meant to the French on the part of the hotel management by employing their language as one of the mediums of instructing its many-tongued guests in proper deportment. The management realises that of all Europeans Germans are most in need of lessons in deportment; but the hotel, for some reason, is rarely afflicted with Germans, and French is understood by all the people of the Near East of the class that patronise a hostelry like the d’Angleterre. There are several hotels in Salonica which will not permit guests to sleep on the floor. Salonica is the metropolis of Macedonia, and an important commercial centre. It is the Thessalonica of old, built by Cassander on the site of ancient Therma, and named by him after his wife, a sister of Alexander the Great. It is older than Constantinople, and has a history which just falls short of being great. Xerxes and his hosts camped on the plains between Therma and the Axius, now the Vardar, and the view of Mount Olympus across the bay inspired him to explore the course of the Peneus; and a short time before the Peloponnesian War the Athenians occupied Therma. Thessalonica fell into the hands of the Romans, became the chief city on the Via Egnatia, and disseminated Christianity among many of the Slavs, Bulgarians, and other peoples who came down from the north and the east. It became a free city and then a part of the Byzantine Empire, and was finally sold by a Greek emperor to the Venetians, from whom it was captured in 1430 by the Turks. High up in the Turkish quarter of Salonica--which rises in a long slope and then in steps from the sea--is a queer little Greek monastery dating back unknown centuries. It was there when the Turks came; for history records that the monks within its walls were treacherous to their fellow-Christians and sold the city to the Mohamedans. Under the courtyard of the monastery runs the aqueduct which supplies Salonica with water from the mountains, and supplied Thessalonica five hundred years ago. It was access to this, a certain means of reducing the city, that the monks of Chaoush (such is the name of the monastery) bartered when the Mohamedans besieged Thessalonica, for certain privileges to be granted after the conquest. The Turks have kept their bargain to this day, but Chaoush has not flourished. Time has moved the Christian quarter down to the sea, and the monastery is surrounded to-day by houses with latticed windows.