In the bottom of the valley at our feet lies the village of Meskla, built along the banks of the Platanos, where it is a pure, cold, rushing mountain brook, of which, in any other part of the world, the eddies would have been alive with trout, but in which now there are only, as in all other Cretan rivers, eels. A party of official personages in Canéa, including her Britannic Majesty's consul, myself, the American ditto, with the captain and officers of the English and French gunboats on the station, and an English colonel in the Turkish army, had made a picnic party to Meskla, in August of the last year of the war. The Turkish troops held Lakus and Omalos and the western bank of the Platanos down to the plain; but the insurgents still remained in possession of all the northern spurs of the Asprovouna, from Lakus east for twenty miles, including Zourba; and, while we drank toasts and ate our roast-lamb under the plane-trees by the river, a perpetual peppering of rifles was going on from the hill-tops on each side of the valley above. Was it fighting, or was it fun? I began to climb one of the nearest spurs on the Turkish side of the ravine to see, and, not to be suspected of both sides, took my way to the picket of Turkish irregulars, which, sheltered by a group of trees on the summit, was firing across the valley in a desultory way. As I showed myself in one of the windings of the path to the patriots at Zourba, I saw the smoke-puff of a rifle on the edge of a ravine, and the ball glanced along the rocks within three feet, spattering the lead over me in a most convincing way. I naturally made a flank movement, which shortly degenerated into the retrograde of a satisfied curiosity. The incident had a side interest to the whole party, for it showed us that the road we proposed to take might be dangerous, the more as we had a Turkish officer and his two attendants in uniform in our company. We had purposed following the river up still higher, and then crossing the ridge to Theriso.