The bishop was alive to opportunities, and the unexpected arrival of two newspaper correspondents was a great chance for him. It quite caused him to lose his dignity for the time being in an effort to do the cause he espoused a service. He explained the presence of the soldiers below; he had received a letter from the insurgents telling him they would kill him unless he desisted from thwarting their diabolical propaganda. Then, as a preliminary to a lengthy discourse on Bulgarian atrocities, the bishop cautioned us to believe every word he said. Indeed, we could take his word as we could that of an English gentleman, and we could publish everything he said, even if the committajis slew him for it. The old man here paused, at our request, for the interpreter to translate his remarks, and while interrupted, he called several attendants and despatched them in different directions--two to the Greek school for ‘professors,’ another to the kitchen for coffee and jelly, and still a fourth on another mission--all for our enlightenment and material benefit. Then he resumed his lecture, during the course of which the professors began to arrive, and with them came also a member of the Greek community, who, the bishop proposed, should lodge us that night. The professors joined the bishop in blaspheming the Bulgars, but our host-to-be only substantiated accounts of atrocities at the appeal of the others. Three little girls, who had to be dressed, were sent into the room. They courtesied as they entered and kissed our hands. These were the orphans of a man who had been assassinated by the committajis because he refused to contribute to their revolutionary fund. These ‘brigands’ had murdered several priests in the district, mutilated their bodies in a shocking manner, and laid them in the high-roads or before their churches as a warning to their compatriots. No punishment, said the Metropolitan, was too severe for such fiends, and, questioned by us, he declared that he informed the authorities whenever he learnt that there was a band in the district. We asked the bishop for some information of the affair at Armensko, but this was not in the line of his discourse, and he evidently did not care to complicate the Balkan question for our uninitiated minds. The great question was the Bulgarian propaganda. He dispensed with the massacre as a ‘mistake of the Turks; they should not have done what they did,’ and returned to the insurgent question. We took notes of the Metropolitan’s remarks, but he was dissatisfied that we should permit any to go unrecorded. Finally, as we started to leave, the old man said, with a touch of resentment in his voice, ‘I wish _I_ knew English; I would write letters to the _Times_ and let the world know the truth.’