The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II | Page 5

to judge the case, as I had a right to do, he being my protégé, left me only the responsibility of the counsel for the prisoner, and I determined to acquit him if possible. The bullet had, fortunately, gone through the boy and could not be found; and, as the wound, though through the lungs, was healing in a most satisfactory manner, and would leave no effects, I had no scruples in preventing a conviction that would have punished an involuntary offense by a terrible penalty, which all who know anything of a Turkish prison can anticipate. The governor-general was very angry, and the kaimakam was severely reprimanded, but they could not help themselves. My position under the capitulations was secure, but it made the hostility between the pasha and myself the more bitter.
The accumulated oppressions of Ismael Pasha had finally the usual effect on the Cretans, and they began to agitate for a petition to the Sultan, a procedure which time had shown to be absolutely useless as an appeal against the governor; and, while the agitation was in this embryonic condition, I decided to go back to Rome and get my wife and children. We were still in the state of siege by the cholera, and there was still no communication with the Greek islands, so that I accepted the offer made by my English colleague, the amiable and gratefully remembered Charles H. Dickson, of whose qualities I shall have to say more in the pages to come, of a passage on a Brixham schooner to Zante. Sailing with a clean bill of health, we had to make a fortnight's quarantine in the roadstead, and, taking passage on the Italian postal steamer to Ancona, I was obliged, on landing, to make another term of two weeks in the lazaretto, though we had again a clean bill; and, on arriving on the Papal frontier by the diligence, we had to undergo a suffocating fumigation, and all this in spite of the fact that no one of the company I had traveled with had been at a city where cholera had existed at any time within three months, or on a steamer which had touched where the cholera was prevalent. At that time there was no railway northward from Rome, and traveling was conducted on the system of the sixteenth century, except for sea travel.
I was not long cutting all the ties that bound me to Rome, though I left a few sincere friends there, and, drawing a bill on my brother for my indebtedness to the kind and helpful banker, an Englishman named Freeborn, to whose friendship I owed the solution of most of the difficulties and all the indulgences I had enjoyed while in Rome, I started on my return to Crete in the problematical condition of one who emigrates to a foreign land through an unknown way. I had money enough to get through if nothing occurred to delay me, and no more, for, with the high rate of exchange on America, I felt distressed at the burthen I was laying on my brother, though I had always been told to consider myself as to be provided for while he had the means, and by his will when he died. His death took place at this juncture, and, curiously enough, the draft reached him in time to be accepted, but he died before it was paid. His will made no mention whatever of me, but left all his property to his wife during her lifetime, and to three Seventh-day Baptist churches after her death.
In our consular service there was no allowance for traveling expenses, or provision of any kind for the extraordinary expenses which might fall on the consul from contingencies like mine. The salary at Crete, which had been $1500 during the war, was reduced to $1000 at its close, and in future I had only that and what my pen might bring me. Arrived at Florence on our way to Ancona, we found the Italian government being installed there; and our minister to Italy, Mr. Marsh, knowing my circumstances, insisted on my taking a thousand francs, though his own salary, which was, as in my case, his only income, was always insufficient for his official and social position at the capital. I accepted it, and it was ten years before I paid it all back.
Looking back on this period of my life from a later and relatively assured, though never prosperous condition, I can see that most of my straits in life have been owing to my having accepted the miserable and delusive advantage of an official position under my government. I was not indolent, and asked for an appointment not to escape work, but to be put in the way of work which I