it, and baked our black bread in
the ashes. Then I would clench my fist and cry, "We will kill the
Turks!" but she repeated from the song the words, "I will drive them
across the islands into the deep sea. But before evening sank down the
roebuck was slain, and before the night came the stag was hunted and
dead."

For several days and nights we had been lonely in our hut, when my
father came home. I knew he would bring me shells from the Gulf of
Lepanto, or perhaps even a bright gleaming knife. This time he brought
us a child, a little half-naked girl, that he brought under his
sheepskin cloak. It was wrapped in a fur, and all that the little
creature possessed when this was taken off, and she lay in my mother's
lap, were three silver coins, fastened in her dark hair. My father
told us that the Turks had killed the child's parents; and he told so
much about them, that I dreamed of the Turks all night. He himself had
been wounded, and my mother bound up his arm. The wound was deep, and
the thick sheepskin was stiff with frozen blood. The little maiden was
to be my sister. How radiantly beautiful she looked! Even my mother's
eyes were not more gentle than hers. Anastasia, as she was called, was
to be my sister, because her father had been united to mine by the old
custom which we still keep. They had sworn brotherhood in their youth,
and chosen the most beautiful and virtuous girl in the neighbourhood
to consecrate their bond of friendship. I often heard of the strange
good custom.

So now the little girl was my sister. She sat in my lap, and I brought
her flowers and the feathers of the mountain birds: we drank together
of the waters of Parnassus, and dwelt together for many a year under
the laurel roof of the hut, while my mother sang winter after winter
of the stag who wept red tears. But as yet I did not understand that
it was my own countrymen whose many sorrows were mirrored in those
tears.

One day there came three Frankish men. Their dress was different from
ours. They had tents and beds with them on their horses, and more
than twenty Turks, all armed with swords and muskets, accompanied
them; for they were friends of the pacha, and had letters from him
commanding an escort for them. They only came to see our mountains, to
ascend Parnassus amid the snow and the clouds, and to look at the
strange black steep rock near our hut. They could not find room in it,
nor could they endure the smoke that rolled along th