and New York is not unacquainted with blizzards. Since the seventeenth century, last winter was said to be the coldest Salonika has ever known. I was not there in the seventeenth century, but am willing to believe that last winter was the coldest since then; not only to believe it, but to swear to it. Of the frost in 1657 the Salonikans boast the cold was so severe that to get wood the people destroyed their houses. This December, when on the English and French front in Serbia, I saw soldiers using the same kind of fire-wood. They knew a mud house that is held together with beams and rafters can be rebuilt, but that you cannot rebuild frozen toes and fingers. In thrusting history upon Salonika, the last few years have been especially busy. They gave her a fire that destroyed a great part of the city, and between 1911 and 1914 two cholera epidemics, the Italian-Turkish War, which, as Salonika was then Turkish, robbed her of hundreds of her best men, the Balkan-Turkish War, and the Second Balkan War. In this Salonika was part of the spoils, and Greece and Bulgaria fought to possess her. The Greeks won, and during one year she was at peace. Then, in 1914, the Great War came, and Serbia sent out an S. O. S. call to her Allies. At the Dardanelles, not eighteen hours away, the French and English heard the call. But to reach Serbia by the shortest route they must disembark at Salonika, a port belonging to Greece, a neutral power; and in moving north from Salonika into Serbia they must pass over fifty miles of neutral Greek territory. Venizelos, prime minister of Greece, gave them permission. King Constantine, to preserve his neutrality, disavowed the act of his representative, and Venizelos resigned. From the point of view of the Allies, the disavowal came too late. As soon as they had received permission from the recognized Greek Government, they started, and, leaving the King and Venizelos to fight it out between them, landed at Salonika. The inhabitants received them calmly. The Greek officials, the colonel commanding the Greek troops, the Greek captain of the port, and the Greek collector of customs may have been upset; but the people of Salonika remained calm. They were used to it. Foreign troops were always landing at Salonika. The oldest inhabitant could remember, among others, those of Alexander the Great, Mark Antony, Constantine, the Sultan Murad, and several hundred thousand French and English who over their armor wore a red cross. So he was not surprised when, after seven hundred years, the French and English returned, still wearing the red cross. [Illustration: "In Salonika the water-front belongs to everybody."]