confined many weeks, a good constitution, and excellent surgical aid, soon restored to me the use of the injured limb. I remained concealed, as on the former occasion, in the Monastery. In the course of this dreadful interval, (dreadful to one who had led a restless, and sometimes, as chance decided, a robber's, or a pirate's life,) my mind, thrown back on its own resources, yet possessing an unquenchable craving for variety of scene and novelty of indulgence, became fierce, irritable, morbid, and, like a besieged garrison, which, deprived of all foreign supplies, and compelled to subsist on what it had stored up within itself, must soon either be relieved from the beleaguering force, or surrender to the enemy at discretion. Activity and freedom would have dispelled the gloomy thoughts which were now the daily inmates of my bosom, and turned aside my distempered fancy from incessantly brooding over schemes of revenge. And here I may confess to you a part of my creed, although I am aware you will condemn it. I hold it generous, manly, noble, to forgive an injury; but mean, cowardly, and despicable, to permit an insult premeditated to pass unrevenged. This is the law of nature, which implanted in man the stormy passions of resentment and revenge, that fear might constrain those who have taught their minds to contemn the dictates of truth and justice. Storms occur both in the natural and moral world, and accomplish an important and beneficent purpose in both. My mind was, therefore, made up to seek for vengeance, although I should follow it to the ends of the earth; and I said to myself, "Let me but see the blood of this accursed Disdar spring after the blow of my trusty handjar, and I shall die happier than a Grand Mufti, assured of a place in the Prophet's Paradise, and of having his choice of those black-eyed maidens fabled to bless the arms of the true believers." There is an unspeakable pleasure in gratified revenge, which men of weak and wavering minds can never taste or know. They suffer the gnawing of the craving appetite, but feel not the intense and unspeakable, but tempestuous delight, that results from a reckless and desperate deed, prompted by an insult expiable only by blood. The minds of such men are incapable of that intuitive decision-that sudden spring from purpose to action-which suffers not the enthusiasm and exaltation of passion to slide into the meanness of calculation, nor the proud, but dark resolution of an energetic spirit, to be evaporated by those misgivings, scruples, and fears, which, while they lessen not the atrocity, detract from the dignity of crime. But this is not all, nor the worst. Fear, and its consequence indecision, invariably compromise the safety of him whom they enslave. He reluctantly obeys his passion-acts, with hesitation and remorse struggling for the victorylingers-allows the moment of action to elude him-attempts what, though practicable an instant before, is now impossible; and, for his failure, is branded with all the guilt, and more than all the execration heaped on the more daring and successful perpetrators of crime. The mean, crouching, trembling villain, is despised-and hanged: the Cæsars, Richards, and Napoleons, are applauded-admired and crowned. My character had no such infirmity as this. By experience I had learned, that danger lessens as you approach-augments as you recede from it. The most desperate actions are always the most successful. How many hundred battles have been won by acts of fortunate uncalculating temerity, which, if but so much as hinted at in the cool hour of counsel and deliberation, would have been repulsed as monstrous and impossible! Actuated by such sentiments, my invention was ever on the rack to devise some means by which I might destroy my enemy. But I tortured my mind to no purpose. The prudent Disdar, knowing well he was obnoxious to the people, never ventured abroad unless well armed and well attended; never, in his rides, took any byeroads or unfrequented paths; never afforded me a chance of sending a ball on a message of affection to his heart. What was I to do? The Disdar Agà had his spies every where. To seek the aid of others was therefore to endanger my own life, without accelerating the purpose for which I exposed it. In this state I spent many weeks; and no tongue can tell-no fancy picture the agony I endured in that brief geance and death. The circumstance was no less singular than unexpected. You are already aware, my dear Panhellenios, that, during my convalcscence, nobody was entrusted with the secret of my retreat except your inimitable brother, the Englishman Tweddell, and Signior Foresti, the rich Corfu merchant. The residence of this last individual was immediately contiguous to the Monastery where I had so often found a home and shelter, and access might be had to it without crossing the street. Foresti had heard of my miraculous escape from the benevolent papas Urban, the chief of the Monastery of St Spiridion, and interested himself ardently in my behalf. Like myself, he cherished an inextinguishable hatred to the oppressors of Greece. Like me, he had suffered both from their cruelty and rapacity. We were soon acquainted, and I became his almost daily guest. At his hospitable mansion we passed the time in general and improving conversation, or in recounting and deploring the wrongs of our common country. Foresti was a man of a cultivated mindlike many of his countrymen, had received his education at the University of Pisa-had travelled muchΠολλῶν δ' ανθρώπων ἶδεν ἄστια και κα interval. I have been in almost every situation of peril in which a human being can be placed-a robber a pirate-a slave-the master of slaves-a common soldier-an officer of rank-a renegade, traitor, and deserter;-I have been in a Turkish prison, and in a Sicilian pesthouse; I have been condemned to death, and have made my escape not an hour before impalement ;-I have suffered every extreme of heat and cold, of hunger and thirst, of disease and misery, and have been turned out on the naked hill-side, without food, money, clothes, arms, or shelter;-I have known the remorse of shedding blood;-I was destined to witness my wife and children blasted in an instant, by the breath of the destroying angel, blowing pestilence and death "from his shrivel'd lips ;"-prompted by the raging madness of a jealousy artfully fanned to fury, I plunged my handjar into the faithful bosom of one who loved well, but not wisely-a deed that still "weighs heavily against my soul;-I have done and suffered all this and more--but the whole sufferings of my past guilty life, though concentrated into one moment of agony, would have been as nothing to the burning and consuming suspense of that horrid interval, during which my throat sometimes burned with a raging thirst, like that of Belzoni, when all but suffoca-ya-had profited greatly by the ted with the volatile dust of the fragmented mummies in the cavities of the Pyramid. Rest had forsaken my eyes-my blood was converted to a thin semitransparent fluid-an unnatural heat had dried and parched my whole body-my skin became shrivelled and wrinkled like fish dried in the sun-and death itself, if my purpose had been fulfilled, would have been hailed as a sovereign balm for an immedicable wound. The miseries of the damned in hell cannot surpass what I then endured! promiscuous intercourse of a commercial life, which, more than any thing else, is calculated to liberalize the mind, and to make a man a citizen of the world, without impairing his attachment to his native soil-and, above all, he had imbibed an ardent and irrepressible love of freedom, accompanied with a generous longing for the resurrection and regeneration of Greece. For his manly and expanded views on the subject of rational liberty he had been, in a great measure, indebted to his connection with a branch of an English mercantile house established at Corfu, soon after the Republic of the Seven Ionian Islands had, in a fortunate hour for itself, Fortune, which delights to smile on daring deeds, at length brought a circumstance to my knowledge which gave me the entire option of ensuring the ruin and destruction of my enemy,been placed under the protection of without encountering the smallest personal hazard-or, of avenging my own and others' wrongs, by becoming myself the minister at once of ven Great Britain. I, also, had seen a little of the world; but my experience had been gathered in a quar ter very different from Foresti's and the affection of this innocent girl served to soothe even my boister ous and perturbed spirit. From the daughter of Foresti I learned the fatal secret that sent the Disdar to heaven! A Turk, an officer of artillery, had married a Greek lady, distantly related to the family of Foresti.→→→ This Turk, infinitely more polished and humanized than the sons of Othman in general are, was be→ lieved to be a renegado Englishman, whom some misfortune or crime had driven from his own happy country, and compelled to assume the turban, profess Islamism, and submit to that horrid rite of initiation indispensable to the character of a Moslemin. In his character, coldness, caution, and distrust, were strangely mixed up with great shrewdness, intelligence, observation, and knowledge of the world. Though he had made the usual pilgrimage to Mecca, and had acquired, in consequence, the title of Hadgee, he was regard among robbers, pirates, and outlaws, -men who subsisted by violating those laws which other people revere and observe, and who contemned the spoils of our enemy unless purchased at the expence of life or blood. Daring and desperate as many of my adventures had been, however, I communicated them, without reserve, to this generous and enlightened Islander, who did not deem the worse of me for having in my time sent some few odd Osmanlees to Paradise a little too soon. But Foresti was not the only person interested in the story of my "hair-breadth escapes," and my adventures by flood and field. He had a daughter, an only child, who was a constant, silent, but deeply-interested listener to our conversations. This gazelleeyed daughter of the East, to a sylphlike and etherial lightness, and grace of form and contour, united a mind, quick, powerful, penetrating, and a spirit of flame, that must either find an object on which to lavish its ardent affections, or perish self-absorbed by the more rigid and orthoed and self-consumed. The youthful Zoë had all the unsophisticated bashfulness of nature, without that artificial, factitious, and repulsive coldness and inanimateness, which the forms of more polished society bestow, and which act like a species of moral mildew on the spontaneous impulses of the heart and the affections. She mixed easily in the society of her father's house, without appearing to imagine that she was even a unit in the sum-total of his establishment, or that any human being would waste a second thought on so insignificant a creature as herself. In short, like the wonderful creation of the Rhodian's chisel, she seemed to be "compounded of every creature's best." On the heart of this child of nature I flattered myself that I had made an indelible impression. Often did I observe her eyes glistening with tears, more precious in my sight than all the gems of Istakhar, when her father caused me, again and again, to relate the particulars of my escape from the dungeons of Djezzar, Pasha of Acre. On these occasions, glances were exchanged between us which spoke unutterable things. We loved: she opened to me her whole heart; dox Moslems as no better than a Giaour in his heart. But he was an officer of high reputation for skill and bravery; and, on three different occasions, his knowledge and experience had turned the tide of battle at the very flow, and rendered the crescent triumphant. At the same time, it was well known that he abhorred the Disdar-and his wife, for a reason of her own, participated largely in the same feeling. In the confidence of unsuspecting friendship, the latter communicated to Zoë what I am now about to relate. It is well known, that at certain stated hours the jealousy of Turkish husbands is so far relaxed as to permit their wives to take the amusement of the bath, where, accordingly, they often assemble in considerable numbers at a time-talk over the topics of scandal, in which women invariably indulge when secure against eaves-dropping and interruption-and while away their time in a manner which, to such prisoners as they are, possesses the highest possible attractions. The bath is, in fact, the Turkish ladies' coffee-house, whither they repair, as soon as they obtain permission, with incredible eagerness and delight. I need not add, that while the ladies remain, the bath is inaccessible to the other sex; and any attempt to awaken the jealousy of Turkish husbands, by intrusions into the sacred place, would entail on the offender the promptest and the most summary vengeance. In an unfortunate moment for himself, the Disdar Agà-a profligate man in regard to women-listened to the suggestions of his evil genius personified as the dæmon of Curiosity; bribed Haroun the eunuch, who guarded the door of the bagnio during the time the ladies remained; secreted himself in a dark corner of the apartment, feasting his unhallowed and lecherous eyes, like another Action, on the forbidden charms of many of the "fair of Greece;" and at last escaped, unperceived by all, except the friend of Zoë, who, alarmed for the consequences, though indignant at the insult, had hitherto revealed the fatal secret only to this inexperienced girl, who again, in a moment of unsuspecting fondness, disclosed it to the only man on earth who would have renounced the empire of the world to possess the power over the destiny of the Disdar, which such a secret conferred. At the same time I must admit, that I was at first a little doubtful of the truth of the story. It was difficult to believe that a mere distempered curiosity could have led him to commit an act of such hazard and temerity, as, had he been discovered, would have caused him to be hacked to pieces by the sabres of the jealous and infuriated husbands. Zoë had been just singing to me, with inimitable pathos, simplicity, and effect, the immortal lines of Kallistratos, 'Ev púgrov xλadì rò ¿ípos Pognow, ...words which no Greek can hear without feeling unutterable emotions and deep breathings of spirit, which seem to speak to him, with an authority derived from heaven itself, confirming his anticipations of the future deliverance, freedom, greatness, and renown, of his now subjugated, but still interesting country. Tyrannicide, so far from being a crime, I reckon the grand climax of patriotic virtue. Is there even a Hyperborean heart that does leap to the words, Φίλται 'Αρμόδι, οὔ τι που τέθνηκας or that refuses to join in the simple but sublime declaration of this poet of freedom, Ausὶ σφῶν κλέος ἔσσεται κατ' ? But I am wandering from my subject. I left the lovely daughter of Foresti when her lay was ended, and instantly repaired to Haroun the eunuch, whose life I had once, in Constantinople, saved from the bow-string by my interference, and from whom I reckoned myself certain of ascertaining the truth. Prompt and rapid in all my doings, I no sooner found the wily spado, than I taxed him with his treason. Nothing abashed by this accusation, he answered me cool and self-possessed ; denied the story with a firmness and modesty that almost staggered me; and appealed to my own understanding, if I thought him such a blockhead as to put his neck a second time in peril. Still I was not to be turned at fault by all his artifice and cunning; I eyed him with intense and furious scrutiny; and observed that, with all his experience in deception, and with all his self-command, a momentary hectic flitted over his charnel-vault countenance, like a light cloud over the moon, while his rebellious nether lip gave two or three convulsive shivers. Ha! thought I, so I am to be outdone and deceived by this miserable emasculated slave? "Look you here, Haroun," said I; "do you know this yataghan? I am a man of few words. Tell me the truth, and you are safe— hesitate a minute longer, and you are food for worms. Answer me, slave. Has the Disdar Agà ever, by your treachery, penetrated into the bath?" Fear of instant death from my hand, or, what would have been the same thing to him, of my revealing his unpardonable treachery, wrung from him a reluctant confession, THAT IN AN HOUR AFTER, THE DISDAR WOULD BE AGAIN IN HIS CONCEAL MENT IN THE BAGNIO. Not a second was to be lost. We arranged our plans on the instant. I was to return to the Monastery for my arms, and to order my servant, with three horses, immediately to leave the city; and, taking the road to Egina, to wait for us near the ruins of Enneakrounos. Haroun, who had already gone too far to think of any thing but consulting his safety by a precipitate flight, preceded by a French leave; and who, unlike the generality of his brethren of the third sex, was brave, and had oftener than once been shown the eye of an enemy in the field, agreed to provide himself with two braces of pistols, two daggers, and a sword, and the moment I entered the bagnio, to repair to the place of rendezvous, and there wait my arrival. I returned to my apartments in the Monastery with a bounding, elastic step, revenge having inspired additional vigour, and the tide of life appearing to flow with greater fullness and alacrity as I was on the eve of accomplishing what I had long meditated and wished for. In a minute I was armed, and had seized on a purse or two of zechins and piastres. I paced the room in a state bordering on frenzy, yet, strange as it may seem, in full possession of all my faculties. I thought the hour would last for ever. A hundred times at least did I look to the watch which the chief of the Arnaoot robbers took from the murdered Frank, and afterwards presented to me, as my deadly aim had laid him low. Still, extreme caution was necessary. I must not anticipate the Disdar. Should he discover me on the street in my way to the bath, my destruction would be matter of mathematical certainty; and, what was worse, my plan of vengeance rendered abortive. The terribly tardy hour must therefore be suffered to elapse before I even moved from my apartment. At this moment some one knocked, with unusual violence, at the gate. My heart bounded to my throat as I cursed my evil stars, that had sent this unseasonable interruption to neutralise the thunderbolt which fate had forged for me to hurl at the head of my enemy. As my trusty Albanian servant had been sent off with the horses, and as the good papas had gone out, I repaired cautiously to the wicket, and asked, in a feigned voice, who knocked?-when the low but significant whisper of Haroun informed me that the Disdar's hour VOL. IX. was come, and that all was ready. Who shall describe the stormy and conflicting sensations of that "crowded hour of glorious life!" To live it over again I would almost encounter the peril of endless misery. I wrapt myself in my dark Mainiote cloak-moved along the streets, as I believed, unobserved-was directed by Haroun, in three words, to the concealment of the Disdar-and, in a minute and a half, was at the entrance of the bath. My own fate, as well as that of my enemy, trembled on the butterfly wing of every moment. I entered softly the cavern of death fastened the doors behind meand glided rapidly to the spot whence the Disdar Aga was destined never to return. It was dark, and he did not recognise me. "Haroun!" said he, "be careful, or we are undone.""Remorseless fiend!" cried I, in a suppressed voice," you are now in my power!-take that!-and that!and that!"-striking him three violent blows with my dagger, which, however, were not instantly fatal. We closed, and a deadly and desperate struggle ensued, which lasted for a few minutes. At last, after repeated efforts, I disengaged my right arm from his grasp, and repeated my blows with such decisive effect, that he uttered a loud, long, deep groanand expired! 1 The ladies in the bath, after the fashion of women, were making so great a noise, and talking so loudly, that our previous struggle had passed unobserved. But the terrible groan, or rather yell, which still rings in my ears when I think of the transaction, and with which the Disdar surrendered his guilty and atrocious spirit, made" the vaulted roofs rebound" with its horrid, unearthly emphasis. A loud and long-continued screaming and shrieking now arose on all sides. I sprung towards the door, but, in the confusion, lost my way, and wandered among the pillars and compartments of the bath. The ladies, forgetful of their being as was mother Eve before she fell, clustered round me in their helplessness and terror, and several fainted away at my feet, when I motioned them to silence with my dagger, still streaming with the Disdar's blood. Let him who can imagine the agony 3 R |