spoused.

The last great stand was at Missolonghi. Built on the edge of a marshy
plain, bounded on the north by the high hills of Zygos and protected
on the south by shallow lagoons at the mouth of the Gulf of Lepanto,
and chiefly tenanted by hardy fishermen, this town had been the first
in Western Greece to take part in the Revolution. Here in June, 1821,
nearly all the Moslem residents had been slaughtered, the wealthiest
and most serviceable only being spared to become the slaves of their
Christian masters. In the last two months of 1822 the Ottomans
had made a desperate attempt to win back the stronghold; but its
inhabitants, led by Mavrocordatos, who had lately come to join in the
work of regeneration, had resolutely beaten off the invaders and taken
revenge upon the few Turks still resident among them. "The wife of one
of the Turkish inhabitants of Missolonghi," said an English visitor
in 1824, "imploring my pity, begged me to allow her to remain under
my roof, in order to shelter her from the brutality and cruelty of the
Greeks. They had murdered all her relations. A little girl, nine years
old, remained to be the only companion of her misery."[A] Missolonghi
continued to be one of the chief strongholds of independence in
continental Greece; and, the revolutionists being forced into it by
the Turks, who scoured the districts north and east of it in 1824 and
1825, it became in the latter year the main object of attack and the
scene of most desperate resistance. Here were concentrated the chief
energies of the Greek warriors and of their Moslem antagonists, and
here was exhibited the last and most heroic effort of the patriots,
unaided by foreign champions of note, in their long and hard-fought
battle for freedom.

[Footnote A: Millingen, "Memoirs on the Affairs of Greece," p. 99.]

Reshid Pasha, the ablest of the Turkish generals, having advanced into
the neighbourhood of Missolonghi towards the end of April, began to
besiege it in good earnest, at the head of an army of some seven
or eight thousand picked followers, on the 7th of May. While he was
forming his entrenchments and erecting his batteries, the townsmen,
augmented by a number of fierce Suliots and others, were strengthening
their defences. They increased their ramparts, and organised a
garrison of four thousand soldiers and armed peasants, with a thousand
citizens and boatmen as auxiliaries. At first the tide of fortune was
with them. The Turks had t