little ones? Yes! they would rather meet their death in the merciless but clean sea, than fall, living, into the hands of the vile Turkisk soldiery. Oh! my God—my Christian God—how can you permit it?"
He would bow his head on his arms and remain motionless, until the feeling which was choking him had passed. Then, in a subdued tone, he would resume:
"Crete! Crete! brave, indomitable Crete—always victorious, yet always handed back to the Turks by Christian Europe. My beautiful Crete, when shalt thou be free?"
It was on such days that he exhorted me to remember the little Greek flag he had given me, and all that it stood for. On other days, when he was calmer, he took me systematically with him through the entire nine years of the Greek revolution, and by him I was carried through all its glorious battles.
He had fought first under the leadership of Marco Bozaris, and he entertained for this heroic chief an admiration amounting to worship.
"We were only a handful, mostly lads, at first," he would say, with a happy smile on his saddened face. "Yes, we were mostly lads, and Marco himself a little over thirty. But how we did obey him, and how we did fight!"
Here he would lose himself in memory for a while.
