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 How they had obtained horses, I cannot imagine, but we found horses waiting for us.

I rode away with an exhilaration I could not calm.

"If I were a man," I said emphatically to my brother, "I should become a brigand. It is a beautiful life."

For the leader, with his curling hair and his black moustache, I felt an especial admiration, in spite of his stand-offishness. He was long my ideal of a hero; and it was one of the bitterest disappointments of my girlhood when, some years later, in a fight between his band and an overwhelming number of Turkish soldiers, he alone of all his men put up a pitiful fight, and died like a coward.

I wept when I read about it, not for him, but for my lost ideal—for the trust and admiration I had placed on a man not worthy to be a leader of Greek brigands.