the consuls. When they left it was taken down and vanished, but within the last few years he found it in a stable in Larnaca, whence the carving was rescued, repainted by some craftsman on board an English man-ofwar which visited Cyprus, and after a hundred years or so of absence, returned in triumph to its old home.

Cyprus is fortunate in possessing in Mr. Cobham an official who takes so deep an interest in her history, and spares no expense or pains in attempting its record. On the occasion of my visit he spoke to me very sadly of the vandalism which the authorities threaten to commit by the throwing down of the seaward wall, curtain-wall I think it is called, of the ancient, fortified city of Famagusta, in order, principally, that the stone and area may be made use of for the purposes of the railway, which it is proposed to construct between Famagusta and Nicosia. Of this suggested, but as yet happily unaccomplished crime, I shall have something to say on a later page.

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CHAPTER VI

COLOSSI

ON the day following that of our arrival in Cyprus the Flora reappeared from Famagusta and about noon we went on board of her to proceed to Limasol, some forty or fifty miles away, where we were engaged to stay a week or ten days. The traveller indeed is lucky when he can find a chance of making this journey in the course of an afternoon by boat, instead of spending from ten to fifteen hours to cover it in a carriage. Although Cyprus in its total area is not much, if any, larger than the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, locomotion is still difficult owing to the impassable nature of the ways and the steepness and frequency of the mountains. When I visited it fourteen or fifteen years ago there were no roads to speak of in the island, except one of a very indifferent character between Larnaca and Nicosia. The Turks, its former masters, never seem to make a road; they only destroy any that may exist. Now in this respect matters are much improved. The English Government, out of the pitiful sums left at its command after the extraction from the colony of every possible farthing towards the payment of the Turkish tribute, has by slow degrees constructed excellent roads between all the principal towns, with bridges over the beds of the mountain torrents. But as yet in the country districts nothing of the sort has been attempted.

With us were embarked a number of lambs, little things not more than a week or two old, bought, I suppose, for the provisioning of the ship. At this season

of the year everybody in Cyprus lives upon lamb. It was melancholy to see the tiny creatures, their legs tied together, heaped one upon another in the bottoms of large baskets, whence, bleating piteously for their mothers, they were handed up and thrown upon the deck. A more satisfactory sight to my mind were one or two cane creels half filled with beautiful brown-plumaged woodcock, shot or snared by native sportsmen upon the mountain slopes.

On board the steamer, a fellow-passenger to Limasol, whither he was travelling to negotiate for the land upon which to establish a botanical garden, was Mr. Gennadius, the Director of Agriculture for the island. He told me what I had already observed at Larnaca-that the orange and citron trees in Cyprus, which on the occasion of my former visit were beautiful to behold, are to-day in danger of absolute destruction, owing to the ravages of a horrible black scale which fouls and disfigures fruit and leaves alike. (Avnidia coccinea or Avnidia orantii.)

For the last dozen years or so this blight has been increasingly prevalent, the mandarin variety of fruit alone showing any power of resisting its attacks. The proper way to treat the pest is by a number of sprayings with a mixture of from twenty to twenty-five per cent. of soft soap to eighty or seventy-five per cent. of warm water. A dressing thus prepared destroys the scale by effecting a chemical union of the alkali of the soap with the fatty matter in the organism of the parasite, or failing this stifles it by glazing it over and excluding the air necessary to its existence. Mr. Gennadius believes that if this treatment could be universally adopted, scale would disappear from Cyprus within a few years.

But here comes the difficulty. For three centuries the Cypriote has been accustomed to Turkish rule with its great pervading principle of Kismet. If it pleases Allah to destroy the orange-trees (in the case of the Christian peasant, read God) so let it be, he says, and shrugs