The village remains the same to-day as it
was in the days of the Crimean War, and the same families as lived
there then, or their descendants, live there now. I visited the
_starosta_, and he indicated a home where I might sleep the night. I
was taken in by an aged Greek woman and entertained among her family.
They brought me bread and wine, and spread out the best couch for me.
The sons told me of hunting exploits with the bear and the wild boar;
they told me how at Christmas time the wild turkeys fly overhead in
such numbers that it is the easiest thing in the world to shoot one's
Christmas dinner--and I thought that very convenient. When the sons
were silent, or talking among themselves, the old dame told me about
her youth: how she was only seventeen years old at the time of the
war; how the English were the most handsome of all the soldiers, how
the Turks were the most lazy and the most brutal, how the French and
the Italians simpered; how the English soldiers were loved by the
Greek girls, how they were also more generous than the other troops
and gave freely clothes and tea and sugar and whatever was needed in
the cottages and asked no money for it whatever; how in these days the
little children played with the cannon-balls, rolling them over the
moors and up the village street--all manner of gossip the good old
lady told me, beguiling the hours and my ears till it was bedtime.
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