which I have spoken earlier), is one of those best adapted for high cultivation and semi-tropical gardening which the Mediterranean basin can show. Abundantly supplied with perennial springs, securing easy irrigation, the soil alluvial along the stream, and calcareous on the ridges, it needs but application and a little capital to be made a paradise for an agricultural community. But what can be done in a country where every advance in production is met by a counter move of the tax-gatherer, and where, except by robbery, or farming of the tithes, no one can grow rich, where capital is worth twenty per cent per annum, and would be worth more if there were any considerable demand, and where the Christian, who is the only industrious citizen, can always be robbed of his accumulations, and in many cases of his capital, by an avaricious Mussulman? I have spoken before of the general poverty of Cretan houses, and might add expletives and intensify diminutives in speaking of the dwellers in the Apokorona. It contains many villages, mainly of Christians, the Mussulmans being scattered individuals, and produces much oil, and might produce cereals and vegetables at discretion: but for what end? No road exists which would permit a profitable transport to the towns; cheese and oil only, of its productions, pay freight to Canea; and, beside these two articles, there is, therefore, no inducement to produce more than the peasants use themselves. It is almost useless to ask at one of these villages for a dinner, unless you can dine upon black bread and olives, with boiled herbs in the spring and autumn. fowl fat enough to eat to advantage I never saw,-eggs seem to be all that can be expected from fowls. The houses of the villages in the plains about the cities are luxurious compared with these; a single room divided in two for man and beast; a mat of rushes to sleep on, which the Cretan spares you willingly, to sleep on the floor of earth himself; fleas innumerable and filth immeasurable in the four walls, are what A you must expect to find. But with it all there is a something in the Cretan peasantry which commands respect; and in the Apokorona they are a hardy and independent breed, warlike to a degree. As their country is the gate to Sphakia, which has always been the abode of the bitterest resistance to local tyranny, they suffer the inroads of all the most formidable Turkish expeditions. It is only thirty miles to Retimo from Canea, yet in ten hours' journey we were scarcely half-way. As night drew near we pushed ahead, hoping to find quarters and something to eat at a convent near or at Karidi; and as the Pacha had insisted on my accepting a guard of two mounted zapties, we made the only use of them which the journey offered, and sent them ahead to prepare our quarters, while we followed at a safer pace. As it grew twilight, and we tired and hungry, with a mile yet to the convent, our zapties came clattering over the wretched path to say that the priests had all gone to their farm work at a distant metochi (farm establishment), that the convent was locked, and they could not get in. Too late to get to the next village beyond we had only to retrace our steps in the dark to Vamos, the village last past, where, after much running to and fro of the zapties, and a local official whose status I did not comprehend, we found an empty loft of a house, boasting two stories, which we had to ourselves, and where we spread the blankets which by day made our saddles endurable, I, only, as the high dignitary of the occasion, having a spare mattress. While we looked after the beds, the friendly villagers brought eggs, which frying in oil below, sent up to us sav ory summons to come down and eat; and presently, having disposed of our eggs, olives, and bread, washed down by strong wine, with a relish worthy of a better meal, we adjourned to the village café, and took a cup of coffee, and a nargile offered with eager haste by a Sphakiote captain, who happened to be there on business; and while the curious townsmen came and looked, we down almost vertically to meet its level. The plain was purple with heather, and here and there springs gushed out from the boggy soil and ran to the sea; green willows, mingling with oleanders and shrubs whose names I knew not, marked their courses, and relieved the flatness of the land a little. hubble - bubbled in the open air, the capacity of the café extending only to the fabrication and storing of its commodities. The Sphakiote asked many questions, and answered a few, all I asked. He had come down to buy sheep or sell them, I forget which, and was evidently a man of much consequence, having travelled, having even been as far as Naples. I suspect he had been a pirate in his earlier years, like most of his clansmen, and so had,is, like most of the hundred cities, a grown richer than his neighbors. I have passed a great many more comfortable nights than that, and, as soon as the day dawned, we were in the saddle again. The path (it seems absurd to talk of roads) led down into the pass of Armyro, the eastern gate of the Apokorona. The river-bed was wild and picturesque, though rarely showing signs of water; the hills narrowed in their approaches; and we descended into a gorge, through which, coming from the south, on our right hand, swept a bubbling, dancing stream of clear, beautiful water. But it bubbled out of some saline depths, and would have put the last touch to the woe of Tantalus. It is both medicinal and unpalatable; but its borders are lined with green and luxuriant plants and fringed with flowering oleanders. An old Venetian castle, its battlements crumbling away and its walls festooned with ivy, rising from the little intervale at the bottom, commanded the gorge until the beginning of the Revolution of 1821-30; but the Christians then took it by storm, and dismantled it, since when it has been a ruin, of no great dignity, and not probably destined to boast to many genera tions. Nothing in the deepest wilderness of the New World could be more solitary than this gorge. No sign of habitation existed; beyond us was a bleak moor, occupying a space perhaps a mile wide between the hills and the sea, and desolate as the desert. It is a broad stripe of sea-drift, scarcely as uneven as the sea itself; and at its farther side the bare, strongly marked rock ridges plunged VOL. XXII. NO. 130. 15 Armyro is, by the guess of Pashley, the site of Amphimallion, but no trace of any ancient city can be discovered; it name and nothing more, one of the traditional witnesses of the turbulent and checkered character of the history of Crete, each city besieging, razing its neighbor, and being razed in turn. Almost the only ruins which we find are, Pelasgic, and are those which no hate could lend force to destroy, even late Roman ruins have melted away in the fierce struggles between Christian and Saracen since the eighth century; the castle-builders and the temple-haters have left nothing that could be moved. At our left, on the sea-shore, where the river of Armyro (a name which signifies salt-spring, being the Cretan for Almyro) empties, was Amphimalla, — a maritime town having a port protected by an island, which still offers shelter for a few small craft from northerly gales; at the right, at the foot of the picturesque hills, is the lake of Kuma, now only noted for its habit of overrunning with the melting of the snows in spring, and flooding the plain around with eels, which the peasants bring to Canea for sale. It was anciently the site of a temple of Athena, and a city called Corium. No trace of ruins on either of these places exists, and so we contented ourselves with looking at them from afar, and followed the meandering path down to the sea. We passed on the way a small clearing planted with melons, which grow of excellent quality in the warm sandy soil, where running streams render irrigation easy. A Cretan, with dog and gun, inhabited a little house made of reeds, in the midst of the field, and guarded its product from passersby; of him we purchased a supply for a few paras (a para is a hypothetical coin little more than our mill in value). Thence we had about ten miles of smooth sand-beach, at the end of which another river cuts its passage to the sea, and affords us a bit of ruin in a fine, high, single-arch Venetian bridge, which formerly led the road part way up the steep ridge forming the eastern side of the gorge. I could only think what must have been the violence of the torrent which had cut such a chasm for itself through the eternal rock, and turn a resolute shoulder to the temptations of picturesque bits which its zigzag cliffs presented. The place is called Petres Kamara, or arched stones; and the bridge, from which doubtless it derived its name, has been only fragments for many years. Under the Turks, nothing but decay obtains. We had passed, before reaching this point, the village of Dramia (ancient Hydramon), whence a road branches off southward to Argyropolis and Kallikrati, which we shall take on a future occasion (following the campaign of Omer Pacha against Sphakia), and now only note, that, though on the inner side of the plain, it was anciently a seaport, and attached to the important city of Eleutherna, the ruins of which are to the southeast of Retimo, at least twenty miles away. This was a curious characteristic of the early Cretan towns, most of which are built on commanding positions and far from their seaports. Thus we saw that Polyrrhenia was three hours from its port Phalasarna; Aptera, an hour or more from Kisamon; and elsewhere we shall find Cnossus, Gortyn, Lyttus, and other noted cities, placed at considerable distances from their seaports. From Petres Kamara our ride was a rough one, and we found little beside the picturesque beauty of the scenery to interest us. The path wound over rugged ridges and along by the sea, in places at dizzy proximity to the wild precipices against which the winter storms of the Ægean beat, wearing, cutting into caves, and undermining, the massive rock. Only in one place did we halt, at Hagios Nikolas, - -a little The road ascending from this ravine was so bad that I dared not stay on my mule, and most of my retinue had dismounted before me. The old Venetian pavement, which could not be entirely avoided, was worse than the natural rock, but occupied the ledge so fully that we must hobble over its cobble-stones as best we could. And with such ups and downs we drew near to Retimo, whose castle and minarets we saw at length gleaming far off in the noonday sun,- for we had occupied twenty hours of travel in making our journey of thirty miles. It was a bleak, rugged range of rocks from which we saw the city; but the road declined gently along the side and down near the sea. Above it other similar ridges jutted out one after the other, receding in the distance, whereloomed up, sharp and flat, Mount Ida, the birthplace of mighty Jupiter. yond the city the sea-coast swept away in successive capes and bays, and the olive-clad and fertile slopes of Mylopotamo rose from the white-footed cliffs to the gray and glistening peaks which culminated in Ida. Be It was Friday, and, noon coming before we could reach the city gates, we halted at a spring over which some charitable or spring-loving Mussulman had built a domed khan, where wayfarers might rest and cool themselves before indulging in the almost icy water. We must wait here until the noonday prayer was over, as the Mussu'mans, oppressed by a prophecy which they have recorded, that their cities will be taken on Friday, their Sabbath, shut their gates while they are at the mosque. It was a hot day, but the sea-breeze had been blowing an hour or more, and we threw our saddle-blankets on the stone seats, and lay down to rest, until passers-by from the city notified us that the gates were open. Near the city we passed several little cave-chapels and hermitages, which, dug in the soft sandstone,- a rock resembling the Caen stone, — made dry and comfortable dwellings, as compared with those I saw at Katholico and other places. The frequency of these little monasteries, as the Cretans call them all, and of the little chapels which dot the island with their white ruins, attests, as well as history and prevalent customs, the intensely devotional tone of the Cretan character, now mostly shown in absurd superstitions, the growth of ignorance, but occasionally, in a martyr-like adherence to their faith through persecutions of which Retimo can tell many fearful stories, the Ottoman power here, remote from European influences, having had fuller swing in its dealing with the Christians. As we entered the city, my guide called my attention to the very extensive Turkish cemeteries outside the gates, saying that they were almost entirely the growth of "the great revolution"; and, as we entered the little outwork which once defended the approach to the principal city gate, he pointed to a solitary tree, "the hangman's tree," and added that he had seen under that tree, during the insurrection, a pile of Christian heads as high as he could reach. We rode through the gate, through a long, dark passage under the bastion which commanded it, and then through another inner gate, and came out into a little place where the full character of a Turkish town for the first time struck me, cafés, lazy smokers, the overtopping minaret, and the grateful shade of a huge sycamore, with all the world wondering, rising, and staring, as "his Excellency" and suite brought civilization home to them, first time. to some for the "A MODERN LETTRE DE CACHET" REVIEWED. [It is not our custom to print any criticism on articles which have appeared in these pages; but the following paper comes to us with such high claims for consideration, that we give space to it. — EDITORS.] AN article in the May number of ject discussed quite foreign to their this Magazine, entitled "A Modern Lettre de Cachet," is so incorrect in most of its statements, that it does great injustice to certain individuals, and is calculated to leave a false impression respecting the merits of the question at issue. As few of its readers will be likely to detect these misstatements, and fewer still suspect that they are advanced without some color of fact, we feel constrained to give it a notice to which, otherwise, it would hardly be entitled. The scene of the occurrences is hundreds of miles away from most readers, the persons referred to are entirely unknown to them, and the sub thoughts. The common tendency is, in the absence of particular information, to regard that as presumptively true which is confidently and plausibly told; and, thus received, to hold rather than relinquish it, even in the face of the strongest evidence to the contrary. When a man is put on trial for a criminal offence, he is presumed in law to be innocent until proved to be guilty. On the contrary, when an individual or an institution is charged with delinquency at the bar of public opinion, the charge is generally held to be true, until — and sometimes after it is proved to be false. A judicious scepticism in such - a case is one of those degrees of mental training which multitudes never attain. The ostensible purpose of the article in question is to urge a change of the method by which persons are admitted into our asylums and hospitals for the insane. This, it is alleged, can be and actually is perverted into a means of the grossest wrong-doing. In the discussion of the subject, if the wild and reckless statements which make up the staple of the article are worthy of that name, many things are related, implicating more or less directly the honor and honesty of men who have ever stood unspotted before the world; and imputing venality or something worse to institutions generally believed to be engaged in a work of humanity, under the direction of men supposed worthy of their trust. The connection between the thing to be reformed and most of these allegations is not very obvious, for the formalities with which a patient may be admitted into a hospital can have nothing to do with his subsequent treatment. It seems to be only the old artifice of assailing a cause by bringing up some , obnoxious incident, remotely, and not necessarily, connected with it; and the way in which this is managed leads us to suspect that the writer was governed more by private pique than any regard for the public good. We propose to follow him through from one statement to another, and show by indisputable evidence precisely what each is worth; and we solicit the patient attention of all who have been inclined to suppose that they were made in truth and sincerity. It appears that patients are now admitted into hospitals for the insane chiefly on the strength of a certificate of insanity signed by one or two physicians. This is alleged to be all wrong, because physicians-considering what wretches many of them are-may be bribed to certify what they do not be lieve, or may honestly be mistaken in their opinion; and thus persons never supposed to be insane may be hurried away to a place of perpetual confinement, solely in order that ill-natured relatives may be the better able to work out some nefarious purpose. Relatives are so anxious to do this, and physicians are so ready to help them, according to the intimations of this writer, that we can only wonder that half the community, at least, are not shut up, with no hope of release but by death. And inasmuch as physicians have it in their power also to poison every patient whom wicked relations may think it worth their money to get rid of in that way, we wonder that they have not been swept from the face of the earth, instead of being still trusted with the lives of those we hold most dear. Seriously, the usages of society and the common feelings of men indicate no difference between insanity and other diseases, as to the manner in which the patient should be treated by his family and friends. When a person is struck down by mental or other disease, the usual means and appliances of cure are provided; the physician is called in, nurses are engaged, and visitors are excluded from the room. If the physician advises that he can be better cared for somewhere else, that the chances of recovery would be increased by removal to the country, or the seaside, or a watering-place, or by a trip to Europe, the advice may or may not be followed; but it is not customary to think that the physician is actuated by corrupt motives, or assumes a duty that does not belong to him, in giving it. The presumption is nowise different, if, it being a case of mental disease, he advises removal to a hospital as the most approved instrumentality which the science and philanthropy of the age have created for the treatment of mental disorders. We are willing to admit that the medical profession has its share of unworthy members, some of whom, for a consideration, might be induced to commit the alleged offence; but it does not follow that this or any other possible form of delinquency should be met by indiscriminating legislation. No accumulation of safeguards can change |