alternative of the reconquest of Crete, the English Government could clearly not interfere against the Porte without upsetting its own work, and if, in some minor respects, especially the question of the principality, she had been more kind to Crete, no one could have found fault with a policy which was, in its general tendency, obligatory on her. Her great mistake was in not recognizing more clearly the utterly irresponsible nature of the Turkish administration, and compelling the Porte to redress the wrongs which even Dickson, philottoman as he was to the last degree, could not ignore the reality of, before they had passed into the arbitration of arms. I believe that, if Lord Lyons had had the direction of affairs from the beginning, he would have composed the difficulty without bloodshed, for he saw clearly and understood the real merits of the question. Server Effendi succeeded in naming deputies from nearly all the districts of the island, and in compelling most of them to go to Constantinople. One escaped, and came to my house to ask asylum. Of course I was compelled to give it, and he remained for six weeks my guest, when he escaped, disguised as a Russian sailor, on board a Russian corvette, and went to Greece. The others were sent under guard to the capital, where they also demanded protection from the Russian Legation, declaring that they came against their own will, and that of the Cretan people; and so in effect ended a farce, put on the stage with all the appliances of the Turkish Government, and played with their best actors. The arrival of a new swift steamer from England, for the purpose of running the blockade, gave a new _élan_ to the insurrection, and the _Arkadi_ (formerly the _Dream_ of American blockade celebrity), was from this time until her destruction in August of 1867 an element of the first importance in the war. The former blockade-runner, the _Panhellenion_, was a slow steamer, never making above nine miles per hour, and her success in provisioning without a mishap the insurrection for nearly a year, with a squadron of thirty ships to watch her, is one of the most surprising instances of capacity on one side, or incapacity on the other, in the history of marine warfare. The _Arkadi_ not only brought arms and supplies, but she carried away at almost every trip numbers of non-combatants, and formed a safe and reliable means of communication between Greece and Crete, by which messengers, supplies of all kinds, and every requisite for the war were transported with tolerable certainty. The warm weather enabled the insurgents to re-enter the field in greater numbers, and it finally became evident that the war was to be one which would only be finished by the exhaustion of the resources either of Greece or Turkey.