treatment; not that I had great faith in that, but because I could
see no hope for a success for the insurrection. Around me had
spontaneously formed an efficient service for information, the runners
of the various sections coming to me at Kalepa with the earliest
information on every event of importance, and I communicated with
the legations at Athens and our own minister at Constantinople. The
exactness of my news was so well recognized that even the grand vizier
sent regularly to our minister for information, remarking that he got
nothing reliable from his own officials. Now happened one of those
curious cases of mysterious transmission of news which have often been
known in the East. Arkadi was at least forty miles, as the roads
go, from Kalepa,--a long day's journey as travel goes there; but I
received news of the fight soon after it began, and information of the
progress of the combat during the day, one of my customary informants
coming every few hours with the details. This service I subsequently
checked by the information given me by Mustapha's Cretan secretary,
who lived in the house next to mine at Kalepa, and by the accounts
given by some Italian officers of the Turkish and Egyptian regulars
engaged in the siege for the final struggle, and found to be correct.
I believe the account which I gave the world by the next post, and
which was the only complete one ever given, is as near the true
history as history is ever told.

The heavy artillery soon breached the great gate, and an assault was
ordered, but being met by a murderous fire from the convent walls, it
was repulsed with great slaughter; and the succeeding attempts on
the part of the Turkish regulars faring no better, a battalion of
Egyptians was put in the front and driven in at the point of the
bayonet by the Turkish troops behind them. The convent was a hollow
square of solidly built buildings, the inner and outer walls alike