soon as Lieutenant S of the Police arrived, we were taken upstairs to have breakfast, and right royally did we feast. The meal ended, we were given the 'Lapethos Echo,' which contained Haig's and Fooh's communiqués of the 9th September. These too were wonderful, and we were greatly amazed by the change which had come over the main battle front since we saw the last paper at Yozgad before we left; then the Germans were, so we were to believe, knocking at the gates of Paris, After breakfast a hot bath and clean clothes were provided for each of us, our rags being collected in a 8. corner with a view to their cremation. A Greek dootor anointed us with disinfectant, and bandaged anything we had in the way of sores or outs.

At about 3 P.M. two oarriages arrived and our triumphal progress continued. We first paid a final visit to the motor-boat, collecting our few trophies in the way of rifles and flags. This done, we were driven to Kyrenia, a coast town eight or nine miles to the east of us-the police officer and Greek doctor stopping the carriages at every roadside inn to regale us with Turkish delight and iced water. At Kyrenia we were expected by the British residents, who accommodated us for the night and treated us with the truest British hospitality. Our sensations in finding ourselves once more between sheets in a spring-bed are more easily imagined than described. Late

next morning, after a bathe in the sea and when many snapshots of the party had been taken, we were driven off in a motor-lorry, by Captain Gof the A.S.C., to Famagusta, the port of Cyprus on the eastern coast. It W88 an eighty-mile drive, and what with stopping at Nikosia for lunch and at Larnaka for tea, we did not reach Famagusta and the mess of the Royal Scots, who had kindly offered us a home, till 9 P.M.

All the recollections of our four days' stay in Cyprus are of the pleasantest description, as were those also of our voyage to Egypt in two French trawlers. As much cannot be said of the fortnight we spent in Port Said, where we passed the first night sleeping on the sand in a transit camp and most of the rest in hospitalnor of our ten days in a troop train orossing Italy and France. During this time we learntwhat perhaps we needed to be taught that we were after all the least important people in the world. But to tell of these adventures in detail would be to fill another book. Suffice it to say that we were sustained by a few comic episodes: on one occasion, in Italy, we spent five minutes talking Italian, based on slender memories of school-day Latin, to men in another troop train, before we discovered that they were Frenchmen. On another, in France, we remember opening a conversation in French with our engine-driver, who proved to be an American,

At length, on the 16th Oot

OSMAN's father was a hammal, and he really could carry a piano on his back. That has nothing to do with the story, but I simply can't leave it out. The sight of Osman père staggering with a piano through the streets of Salonica is one of my most vivid memories of the Balkans. He was inoredibly bent and filthy-five feet two if straightened out, which he never was, and three feet nine with the piano on his back. His clothes were rags, many-coloured and astonishingly thick. The temperature varied between twenty degrees of frost and ninety odd in the shade, but the costume was always the same. It was only the British who undressed into "shorts" for the heat. Summer and winter, Osman père wore a red cummerbund several yards long, thick baggy underclothes, and thick patched trousers on top, a shapeless upper garment of a carpet-like material, and a fez.

So much for Osman's father. I know very little about his mother. Women don't matter in the Balkans. It is safe, however, to assert that whatever else she might be, she was no "moon of delight." Also that she worked much harder than either the hammal or his Osman père would see to

son. that.

The family residence was situated in the Turkish quarter.

There was no bath h. and o., or any other convenience whatsoever. Drawing-room, diningroom, morning-room, and bedrooms were all thrown into one... nine feet by seven. It was, in short, what plainspoken folks would have called a shed, or a British house agent have advertised as "a self-contained maisonette, convenient of access to the City." You stepped out of the front door-not too boldly, or you might step into the mansion across the way-held your nose as you turned right, and fifty paces brought you to the top of Venizelos Street, the hub of the universe.

There was very little furniture in Osman's home. The floer was earth, and the three beds were "made" direct upon it. One was occupied by Osman, one by his sister, and one by his father and mother, Each had a pile of rags for a mattress, and each was covered with a greasy, ragged eiderdown-for purposes of concealment rather than additional warmth. Under the quilt on number one was a French horseoloth; number two boasted a long Italian cavalry cloak ; and number three, the marital couch, sported a British Army blanket.

There were no chairs or seats of any description. In the hammal's domicile, one lived as one slept on the floor Everything was on the floor,

Bread was begged in war-time from Johnny (anglicè, Tommy)-beautiful white cakelike stuff-a great treat, however stale. French bread was even better, but most difficult to obtain, Frenchmen do not give readily to enemies. Johnny is different. Even old women get things out of

Johnny.... When absolutely unavoidable, bread was also bought in dark flat round loaves in the shops-dingy open-fronted places with publio ovens for those who could afford such things. All the hammal's cooking, however, was done outside, among the smells, in a copper pan over a wood fire. Roasts were unknown. When there was meat, it was stew. Strings of bright red paprika, for flavouring purposes, hung to dry on the outside walls, gave the establishment a sort of meretricious decoration. In the driest corner inside there was also a heap of ripening maize-cobs, some day to become bread when money was short.

The roof leaked, and nobody thought of trying to mend it, or minded that the rain made the house a welter of slimy mud, Allah was Good, and

the sun was hot. The floor soon dried. The one window was broken and stuffed with rags. Allah was Great, but glass was dear.

The landlord, a Spanish Jew, had forgotten or never learned the Turkish word for "repairs." But he always remembered "rent."

Furtively one spat upon his infidel shadow on the pavement in front of his draper's shop in the Rue Ignatia-but one paid, all the same, in cash or kind.

The "kind" consisted in Osman, a boot-black, daily cleaning the landlord's shoes, and the hammal doing all his porterage. The difference was made up in drachmae.

Life was always dear, and food was always scarce, but both were dearer and scarcer now that all these foreign soldiers and unbelievers had got themselves between the Faithful and the Sun. They brought much money-and of course one got what one could; but a hammal and a bootblack had few chances of fleecing them. . Every thing had gone up. Allah was great and Mahomed was his prophet, but prices were painfully high and the feasts of the Faithful were unworthy of His goodness.

The mother and sister worked in the fields, walking four miles each way to Kalamaria morning and evening in the season. The sister, Fatima

But this is Osman's story, so enough of his family.

He was eighteen in 1917a handsome, dark-eyed, lazy