Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/373

Rh of a British passport, appealed to me for protection. I had no jurisdiction whatever in the island; but I did not hesitate to summon the Demarchia to my own house; and, rather to my surprise, they came. I remonstrated with them in very decided language, and told them that, after so much had been done by the Western powers for the protection of the Christians in the East, no one sect of Christians would be permitted to annoy or persecute another, and that religious toleration was the principle which we were resolved to maintain in the Turkish empire. The sleek primates listened with an air of extreme contrition, and apologized for the insult offered to the Italian doctor, which, they said, had been the work of some boys. I remember, when the Turks at Rhodes last year took to menacing the Christians, the same excuse was offered. It is always the children who are put forward on these occasions in the Levant to commence a war of petty insults and annoyances.

About the time when this took place, I made another not very agreeable discovery. On my first arrival at Calymnos, I asked the most respect- able inhabitants of the place to recommend me a person as foreman of my workmen. I was accordingly introduced to an individual called Manoli the Cassiote, who, I was assured, was a, an honourable man, as Antony says of Brutus. Manoli the Cassiote, at the time of my arrival, occupied the distinguished position of cavass, or chief constable of the whole community. He was a man over six feet high, of Herculean