Our little steamer forged ahead at half-speed and the white town kept coming nearer and nearer, until we could distinguish the caiques in the harbour, and the queer, narrow houses with their latticed harem windows which encircled it, and the white mosque with a palm-tree silhouetted against its slender minaret, and even the crowd of ebony, tan, and coffee-coloured humanity that fought for posts of vantage at the water-stairs. It was a picture of sunshine and animation, of vivid colours and strange peoples, such as one seldom sees except in some gorgeously staged comic opera, and as I surveyed it sleepily from the steamer's deck I had a momentary feeling that I was only an onlooker at a play and that the curtain would go down presently and I should have to go out into the drab, prosaic, humdrum world again. But even as this was in my mind a gun boomed out from a crumbling bastion and five little balls ran up five flagstaffs which I had already noticed standing all in a row on the uppermost ramparts and had mistaken, naturally enough, for some new form of Marconi apparatus. The five little balls broke out into five flags and the morning breeze caught up their folds and held them straight out as though for our benefit, so that we could make them out quite plainly. Four of them were old friends that I had known on many seas—the Union Jack and the Tricolour and the Saint Andrew's cross of Russia and the red-white-and-green banner of Italy—but the fifth flag, which flew somewhat higher than the others, was of unfamiliar design; but the blood-red square of bunting, traversed by the Greek cross and bearing in its upper corner the star of Bethlehem, told its own story and I knew it for the flag of Crete. And I knew that there was deep significance in the design of that unknown flag and in the position of the four familiar ones that flew below it, for they signalled to the world that the Turk had been driven out, never to return; that Christianity had triumphed over Mohammedanism, and that the cross had, indeed, replaced the crescent; that the centuries of massacre were now but memories; that peace, in the guise of foreign soldiery, had, for a time at least, found an abiding-place in Crete; and, most significant of all, that the new flag with its single star would be upheld, if necessary, by the mightiest array of bayonets and battle-ships in Christendom.