Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/258

208 for the board and lodging, and is grateful, instead of asking his guest for British protection as the price of a night's hospitality, which happened to me several times in Mvtilene. There is a feeling of mutual satisfaction when you part with the peasant ; there is a feeling of mutual disappointment when you take leave of the bourgeois; you think him not quite so good a fellow as he seemed over his wine the night before, because he has asked you to do something which it would be discreditable to grant; he, on the contrary, grumbles in his heart at having wasted so much good cheer on a Consul who is "not of the right sort."

In reference to the character and social condition of the rural population of Rhodes, I ascertained the following particulars.

Most of the land in the island is in the hands of peasant proprietors. As each peasant generally holds as much land as he can conveniently cultivate with his own hands, and as the population is scanty in proportion to the extent of land capable of cultivation, there are in most districts but few spare hands available as labourers for hire. Again, the produce of the island is for the most part wheat. Richer products, such as silk, olive-oil, wine, tobacco, are not grown in sufficient quantities to create a class of wealthy landowners, but are either consumed in the villages, or exchanged for foreign commodities, such as coffee and sugar, imported by the Jews and Frank merchants established in the town of Rhodes. Thus the Rhodian peasant, fed and clothed for the most part by products grown on