And then there are the soldiers: British Tommies, smart even in khaki, boots shining, buckles shining, faces shining, swaggering along this Cretan street and flourishing their absurd little canes precisely as their fellows are doing all over the globe; French colonials, swathed in blue puttees from ankle to knee and in red cummerbunds from hip to chest, their misery completed by mushroom helmets so large that nothing can be seen of the wearer but his chin; chattering Italian _bersaglieri_, who strut about in cocks' feathers and crimson facings when at home in the Corso or the Toledo or the Via Vittorio Emmanuele, but out here must needs content their vanity with white linen uniforms and green hackle in their helmets; sad-faced Russians, uniformed as they would be in summer in Saint Petersburg or Moscow, flat white caps, belted white smocks, trousers tucked in boots, their good-humoured, ignorant faces stamped with all the signs of homesickness, for their thoughts are far away in some squalid tenement in the poor quarter of Warsaw perhaps, or in a peasant's cabin beside the head-waters of the Volga. Though Canea is the seat of government, Candia—or Heraklian, the classic name by which the Greeks prefer to call it—is the largest and most important town on the island. Disregarding the advice of friends, I went from Canea to Candia on a Greek coasting steamer. No one ever takes a first-class passage on a Greek boat, for the second and third class passengers invariably come aft and stay there, despite the commands and entreaties of the purser, so a third-class ticket answers quite as well as a first. Fortunately—or unfortunately, as you choose to regard it—I had as fellow voyagers a company of British infantry, which was being transferred to Candia after three years' service in the western end of the island. The soldiers, who had managed to smuggle aboard a considerable quantity of rum, quickly got beyond the control of the boy lieutenant, just out of Sandhurst, who was in command, and who, appreciating that discretion is the better part of valour, especially where a hundred drunken soldiers are concerned, wisely left them to their own boisterous devices and retreated with me to the captain's quarters on the bridge, where we remained until we sighted Candia's harbour lights and our anchor rumbled down inside the breakwater.