A'ali Pasha landed on the 4th of October, and on the 13th Captain Murray reported to his Government: "The insurgents have thrown away a golden opportunity in the advent of A'ali Pasha, for I believe, short of annexation, they might have anything they asked for. Whether the concessions would be temporary or not, is a matter of opinion; but his mission has completely failed." This was clear to all, and in December following, the highest Christian functionary of the Turkish Government in the island said to me: "We have got to come to the principality with a Christian prince, and that before it is too late to gain even that--we have nothing to hope for from arms." Yet in a desultory way fighting went on. Omar Pasha went home in disgrace on the 11th of November, but left for his successor, Hussein Avni, a plan for paralyzing the insurrection, by lines of block-houses running across the island and cutting it into three principal parts, each of which was then to be subdued in turn. But if the Cretans had been weakened by the withdrawal of the most of the volunteers, the Turks were enfeebled by sickness and extreme dejection, and the war was languidly carried on, the Turks maintaining themselves within their fortified lines and now and then making a sortie on some bold party of insurgents, the principal affair of the winter being an attack on Zurba, on the 13th of December, which was, like all the previous ones on the village, repulsed with disaster. And under such auspices--the insurrection, less disputed on its ground than at any previous period, holding posts within sight of Canéa; the hospitals of the island filled with sick troops (at and about Canéa alone were an average of 3,000 in the hospital, with unexampled mortality from hospital gangrene and fevers, and the funerals ranging from ten to twenty per day); supplies very low, and the troops only paid three months' pay for the last twenty--the year 1867 went out and the third year of the insurrection came in. And all through the spring and summer this state of things continued, neither the Government nor the insurrection capable of making the feeble effort necessary to extinguish the forces of the other. We in the Turkish lines suffered almost as much as if we were in a besieged town, for supplies from the interior were cut off, and they came not by sea; meat was very dear and poor, vegetables rare and sometimes unattainable, so that I was shut up in my house for three months with a scorbutic malady. What the unfavored must have suffered may be conceived. Despondency and gloom were dominant in all official circles. Building of block-houses went on slowly, but there were not troops enough left in the island to garrison all that were planned, while on the other hand the Hellenic Government gave only assistance enough to keep the insurgents from surrendering, and the Greeks from revolution, which would have been the most probable result of the open abandonment of the insurrection.