partridge's note, as the mother called to her young brood to follow her. The gorge widened to a glen; the slopes receded slightly, and then, after another hour of walking, we came to a sharp turn in its course, where the high mountains walled up the glen to the east with a sheer slope of five or six thousand feet from the peaks to the brook bed, and the rocks on each side shut in like the lintels of a doorway. Here is the little village of Samaria, so long the refuge of the women and children of this section of Crete, and where, so long as arms and food lasted, a few resolute men might have defended them against all comers. I doubt if in the known world there is such another fortress. No artillery could crown those heights, no athletes descend the slopes; while the only access from below is through the river-bed, in one place only ten feet wide, and above which the cliffs rise perpendicularly over a thousand feet; the strata in some places matching each other, so that it seems to have been a cloven gorge--the yawn of some earthquake, which suggested closing again at a future day--and for two hours down from the glen there is no escaping from the river course, except by goat-paths, and these such as no goat would care needlessly to travel. Pashley has described the village of Samaria, and its magnificent cypresses and little chapel, as they are now. No destruction, no sacrilege, has entered there; and perhaps this is the only church in Crete, outside the Turkish lines of permanent occupation, which has not been desecrated. The roof of the chapel is made of tiles, which must date from the early Byzantine Empire. The river below here, the St. Roumeli, is a rapid perennial stream, which at times of flood shuts off all travel by the road. Lower down is a tiny village of the same name as the river, in a gorge into which only an hour's sunlight can enter during the day--damp, chilly, and aguish--the residence of a half-dozen families of goat-herds. Pashley identifies a site near the mouth of the river as that of Tarrha, the scene of Apollo's loves with Acacallis, who, if bred in this glen, must have been of that icy temperament which should have best suited the professional flirt of Olympus. To travellers who care to visit Samaria, I would give the hint to leave their horses at Omalos, and have a boat to meet them at the mouth of the St. Roumeli, as the ascent is long and painful, even by the new road, which, since I saw it the torrents may have demolished. They may thus visit the Port Phœnix of St. Paul, which lies a few miles to the eastward, and landing at Suia, west of St. Roumeli, have their horses come down by the pass of Krustogherako, and so return by way of St. Irene--a very wild pass of the Selinos mountains--to Canéa.