About eleven o'clock, a fierce barking announced the neighborhood of the camp. Ten or a dozen enormous dogs rushed out and hurled themselves upon us, showing all their teeth. Our captors drove them back with stones, and after a quarter of an hour of hostilities, peace was declared. These inhospitable monsters were the advance sentinels of the King of the Mountains. They scent the soldiers as a contrabandist's dog scents a custom-house officer. But that is not all, and their zeal is so great, that they, occasionally, devoured an inoffensive shepherd, a lost traveler, or even one of Hadgi-Stavros' band. The King kept them, as the old Sultans kept their Janissaries, with the perpetual fear of falling a victim to them. The King's camp was a plateau of seven or eight hundred metres in extent. I searched everywhere for our captors' tents. The brigands were not sybarites, and they slept under the sky on the 30th of April. I saw neither heaps of spoils nor a display of treasures, nothing which one would hope to find at the headquarters of a band of brigands. Hadgi-Stavros took upon himself the sale of the plunder; each man received his pay in silver and used it according to his fancy. Some put their money into commerce, others invested in mortgages on houses in Athens, while others bought land in their villages; no one squandered the proceeds of theft. Our arrival interrupted the morning meal of twenty-five or thirty men, who hastened to meet us, bread and cheese in hand. The Chief furnished his band with food: the men received, every day, a ration of bread, oil, wine, cheese, caviare, piment (wine mixed with honey and spices), bitter olives, and meat when their religion permitted. Gourmands who wish for mallows and other green food, can pick these dainties on the mountains. Brigands, as some other classes of people, rarely light a fire for their repasts; they eat their food cold, and their vegetables uncooked. I noticed that everyone was religiously observing the law of abstinence. We were on the eve of the celebration of the Ascension, and these good people, of whom the most innocent had at least the life of one man on his conscience, would not touch a mouthful of meat. Holding up two Englishwomen, at the point of a musket, seemed an insignificant sin; Mrs. Simons had very greatly sinned in eating the cold meat, the Wednesday before Ascension. The men who had escorted us, satisfied the curiosity of their comrades. They were overwhelmed with questions and they answered them all. They put down in a pile, the booty they had secured, and my silver watch scored yet another success, which added to my pride. Mary-Ann's little gold watch was less noticed. In that first interview, public attention fell upon my watch, and it reflected a little on me. In the eyes of these simple men, the owner of such an imposing piece of silver could be no less than a lord.