I rode from Aisaluck to Scala Nuova, which is only four hours off, and from thence I took a passage for Samos on a Maltese brig of twelve hands and six guns and set sail the following morning (March 25th); but when we had made half the passage, which is by rights only about two hours, we met a furious wind which obliged us to put back. I went ashore again, and as the wind rose to the force of a hurricane I watched out of my window no less than eighteen boats and vessels of various sizes blown ashore and wrecked under my very eyes. It was a scene of incredible destruction. The shore was strewn with wreckage and cargoes which had been thrown overboard--oranges, corn, barrels of all sorts of goods--while the sailors, ruined, although thankful to have escaped with their lives, sat round fires in some sheds by the port, the pictures of dejection. The wind detained me till the 28th, when I crossed over in a boat to Bathi in Samos. Here I had to wait first for horses, and then on account of the bad weather. I had to stay indoors, and indoors in a Greek house means anything but privacy. No matter where you sit, you hear everything that goes on in it. Application of any kind is out of the question. In this case, the consular court being at the other end of the house, I had to hear the cases proceeding in it. One in especial went on in detached chapters all the time I was there. A Zantiote had deserted his wife and children eighteen years ago in Mykoni. He had since lived and been married in Cyprus, while the deserted wife went to Smyrna and maintained herself and the children by hard work. She had done what she could to find her husband, in vain, till just as I arrived she discovered him in Samos. She haled him before the consul and demanded that he, being rich, should support her. Not till the whole assembly had joined the bench in calling him every name they could invent would he consent, but finally he signed an agreement to live with his wife in Samos and support the daughter. But this was but the beginning. Every day we had visits from both parties to complain that the conditions were not adhered to: he to say that the agreement to live with them did not involve supporting them; they to say they must be supported, and meanwhile, as they were half starved, to take an opportunity of satisfying their appetites at the consulate.