Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/377

Rh their booty, and then went on their way back to Samos rejoicing. Manoli the Cassiote, when he told me this story, observed, with a grim smile, that such an invasion ought never to have happened, and that the Calymniotes well deserved the loss they sustained for not taking his advice. " I offered," said the head-constable, "to protect the island during the summer months, on condition of receiving an increase of salary. The primates refused my demand; and see what happened."

In Italy, in the 16th century, Manoli the Cassiote would have made an accomplished bravo; and in the service of such a man as the Don Roderigo of the Promessi Sposi, would have distinguished himself above his fellows; for there is in his character a happy mixture of cunning and audacity. In the Greek revolution he would have been equally renowned as an Archipelago pirate; for his natural element is the sea.

Living as he does in the midst of a community which is slowly emerging out of lawlessness and crime into the state of order engendered by regular industry and commercial prosperity, he seems singularly out of place. Every well-disposed and respectable person in Oalymnos would be delighted to get rid of Manoli the Cassiote, because this sort of cut-throat represents that kleftic element which, having once predominated in the Archipelago, is now gradually giving way to civilization; but nobody has the courage to "bell the cat."

It is difficult to find an excuse for this pusillanimous fear of one man in a population of 10,000 persons. It may readily be conceived that in the first