io Mycenae [1888 



Hungarians, or had been doing so, but Bismarck, Mme. Tiirr tells me, 

 threw them over. Now Tiirr is President of the Corinth Canal Com- 

 pany, and his wife, a fat good-natured woman, lives at Kallimaki on 

 the Isthmus. She was daughter of Mme. Bonaparte Wyse, wife of 

 my old chief at Athens whom she calls her father, but old Sir Thomas 

 always repudiated the parentage of her and her brother, who were born 

 after his separation from his Bonaparte wife. With her, in widow's 

 weeds and looking the picture of woe, was a little Greek lady, Mme. 



P , and we three are now in the Hotel at Isthmia, the General 



being away at Paris, and are having a very amusing time, Madame P. 

 having recovered her spirits, and giving us her ideas about Socialism, 

 Eastern politics, and Zola's novels. She was a Greek, born at Alex- 

 andria, but has lived most of her life at Paris. I was sent with an 

 employe to see the Canal works. They are monumental. 



" $th Dec. — On to Nauplia, having spent twenty-four hours very 

 agreeably with these two women. Madame P. has given me a deal of 

 political information. She says every serious person in Greece has 

 been obliged to abandon the grand e idee (that of inheriting Constan- 

 tinople from the Turks). She herself does not think Salonika can 

 be saved from Austria, which is making a successful propaganda there 

 with the Jews and other non-Hellenic inhabitants. The Bulgarians 

 must eventually join Russia, and the Servians too, seeing that they are 

 Slavs. The Roumanians will not do so willingly, but the two great 

 Empires will divide the spoils. The Albanians will be merged either 

 in Greece or elsewhere and lose their nationality. 



"6th Dec. — At Nauplia I find nothing changed since I was last 

 here, not twenty new houses built. The plain, however, which is the 

 richest in Greece, has become wonderfully well cultivated. I drove 

 this morning early to Mycenae to see how much of the ruins Schleimann 

 had left. He has made a sad hash of the town with his excavations, 

 but the Gate of Lions and the Treasury still stand (with Agamemnon's 

 coat of arms over the entrance). What was most interesting, however, 

 in the place is gone, the ancient ruins virgin of all meddling for three 

 thousand years. Back to Athens by train in the evening. The last 

 time I was here we were travelling on horseback, there being no roads 

 in the Morea except the mountain mule tracks." 



This is all that is worth recording of our visit to Greece. On 8th 

 December we went on by sea to Alexandria, travelling in company with 

 Prince Osman Pasha on his way back from Constantinople, where he 

 had been with his uncle the ex-Khedive Ismail, now practically a pris- 

 oner in his own palace on the Bosporus. " He gave me a deal of 

 information about Constantinople affairs. There is much sympathy 

 there for the Mahdists, the Sultan having refused to take part against 

 them at Suakim. It is not believed now that the English occupation of 



