An English working-man of an ill-conditioned type was staying at my hotel. I used to meet him in the café sipping his tea, with an unsightly mongrel dog as his companion. He told me he had come from Lancashire, and was engaged as foreman at some textile works situated on the quay. He had also been in the United States. I asked him how he liked America. He flared up and, pointing to his dog, replied: “You see that ere little _dorg_! Well, I’d rather see ’im dead than in America,” bringing his clenched fist down on the marble table with savage emphasis. This was significant, but not the only testimony since vouchsafed to me of the antagonism between the British trade-union spirit and the conditions of labour in the United States. There was an English public-house in Salonica, on the quay, facing the harbour. It was kept by an English widow, but only opened its shutters on the rare occasions when the English squadrons put into the bay, when it did a brisk business. One continuous stream of Turkish troops from Albania and Asia Minor passed through Salonica, arriving by sea, and, for the most part, disembarking in the dead of the night. I was often awakened by the dull, plaintive chant of these wild children of Asia, or of the untamed sons of the Albanian hills in their white skull-caps, whose voices mingled with the sounds of the waves beating against the stone quay, along which they marched on their way to the railway station. I had been in Salonica about ten days when I received a telegram from Mr. Bennett asking me to proceed to the Turkish headquarters at Elassona, not as War Correspondent, for which vocation at my time of life I scarcely felt fitted, but to report on the real state of affairs, concerning which so many rumours were afloat. I called on the Vali, who gave me the necessary permit and deputed a Circassian officer named Mehmet to be my escort. I engaged a Roumanian, one Hermann Chary, who had formerly been in the service of General Gordon in Egypt, and, I believe, in India as well. He had since drifted to Salonica, and was commissionaire at the Hôtel Impérial on the quay, where I was staying. Even now I often call this man to mind when I read in our newspapers of the extraordinary linguistic accomplishments of some of our leading statesmen who speak French with a Parisian accent or are wonderful German “scholars.” Here was a man who spoke some nine or ten languages fluently, but had to be content to earn five francs a day as interpreter in a third-rate hotel, and was delighted with the chance I offered him of better employment. He accompanied me later in the same capacity on my journey through Armenia. We left Salonica on March 20—a Saturday—and our departure for Elassona was marked by the following childlike flourish of trumpets in the _Journal de Salonique_ (March 22):