clever way they had rid themselves of the importunate old nuisance.” Then he went on to speak of the sufferings of the troops, and assured me that, faithful and obedient as they were by nature and tradition, they would not put up with the vile treatment much longer, and that a military mutiny was brewing which would destroy the Despotism within a few months. In this opinion he was wrong, for thirty years had to roll by before the event which he predicted actually came to pass. He also spoke to me of men of the Young Turk party whom he met in Constantinople during the brief period of free institutions. He much admired their tolerance, and asked me whether I thought that the Young Turk refugees in England, by explaining Turkey’s trouble, would be able to persuade the British Government to champion the cause of Turkish liberty. I discovered, too, that the fame of Midhat Pasha as an honest, just, and patriotic statesman had spread throughout that wild country, and it is not to be wondered at that the Sultan, fearing him, brought about his destruction, and so made him the first martyr of the Young Turkey cause. The Mussulman Albanians themselves greatly revered Midhat, and regarded him as their possible saviour. They had at that time formed themselves into the organisation known as the Albanian League, whose object it was in the first place to resist by force of arms the handing over to Montenegro of the Albanian town and district of Gussinje, which, by the terms of the treaty of Berlin, Turkey had ceded to the mountain principality; and in the second place to throw off the yoke of the Sultan. The leaguesmen were then the masters of Albania. They decided on, and carried out, the murder in Jakova of Mehemet Ali, the general who had been sent by the Porte on the dangerous mission of negotiating this transfer of Turkish territories to her enemies, and about eight thousand of them, Albanians, Mussulman refugees from Bosnia, and deserters from the Turkish army, were holding Gussinje under the leadership of Ali Bey. Gussinje, by the way, still belongs to Turkey; for the Great Powers who had given it to Montenegro were unable to enforce with the cannon of their warships the surrender of a place lying amid the mountains of the interior; so Montenegro ultimately had to content itself with another arrangement.