to sell.

We'd buy it for our mess, but we've got a goose for dinner to-night. Stay and dine with us, old boy."

Through the glass door that showed into the café one saw a little group of civilians, dressed in their Sunday black, waiting for carts to take them from the town. A mother was suckling a wailing child. An old oripple nodded his head helplessly over hands propped up by his stick. A smart young French soldier came in at the door, and Madame's fair-haired daughter rushed to his arms and held him while she wept. They talked fast, and the civilians listened with strained faces. "Her fiancé," quietly explained an interpreter who came through the café to join us in the "Officers only" room. "He's just come from with a motor-transport.

He says he was fired at by machine-guns, which shows that the Boohe is still coming on."

The Camp Commandant of the Division, nervously business-like, the Baths' Officer, D.A.D.O.S., and a couple of padres came in. The Camp Commandant refused to hear of the Colonel sleeping in a tent. "We've got a big dormitory at the back here, sirthirty wire-beds. We can put all your Brigade Headquarter officers up." The Colonel protested that we should be quite happy in bivouacs, but he was overruled.

We dined in a tent in the waggon lines. As I made my way there I noticed a bluepainted motor-van, a mobile French wireless station, some

distance away in the fields. What really caught my eye when I drew near it was a couple of Camembert cheeses, unopened and unguarded, on the driver's seat. I bethought myself that the operator inside the van might be persuaded to sell one of the cheeses. He wasn't, but he was extremely agreeable, and showed me the evening communiqué that had just been "ticked" through. We became friends, which explains why for three days I was able to inform the Camp Commandant, Ronny Hertford, and all their party, of the latest happenings at the Front, hours before the French newspapers and the Continental Daily Mail' arrived.

And what do you think the men of two of our batteries were doing an hour after the camps were pitohed and the horses watered?-playing a football match! Marvellous fellows!

We stayed at D until the evening of the 28th, days of gossip and of fairly confident expectations, for we knew now that the Boche's first offensive was held-but a time of waiting and of wondering where we were to be sent next. Division was nearly thirty miles away, incorporated with the French Army, and still fighting, while Corps seemed to have forgotten that we needed supplies. Still there was no need to worry about food and forage. Ewas an important rail-head, and the Supply Officer seemed anxious to get his stores distributed as soon as they came in: he was prepared to treat most comers as famine-stricken

BETWEEN the Kyrenia Mountains, which form, as it were, the northern sea-wall of Cyprus, and the mountainous mass in the south-west of the island culminating in Mount Troodos or Olympus, lies an unwooded but extremely fertile plain. This plain, on account of its geographical situation, bears the name of Mesaoria, "between the mountains," and stretches from Famagusta in the east to the bay of Morphou in the west. Apart from oocasional plantations and from groves of olives beside some of the larger villages, the Mesaoria is entirely treeless; and in summer, after the orops have been harvested, it has a dreary and barren air when seen from mountains clad with fir. Yet in truth it is anything but barren. It is the granary of Cyprus, very fruitful in wheat and barley; and even in autumn, when the rivers are dry and the sun has soorohed it to a

dusty brown, the glorious skyline of the Kyrenia range, fantastically serrated, relieves it of the reproach of ugliness and desolation.

In the middle of this plain lies the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia, despite the fact that the capitals of islands do not generally lie inland. Nor has Nicosia always held that position. After Cyprus was united

into a single state, both Paphos and Salamis preceded her in the distinotion; and it was not until the advent of the Lusignans that she rose to pre-eminence over the other Cypriote towns. She then became, and for the ensuing three centuries remained, the capital of the most picturesque dynasty and most brilliant kingdom of the Latin East; and in this period, whence date her date her principal monuments, acquired the primacy which she has since retained. The Venetian senator Diedo describes her at the height of her prosperity as "a oity famed as a fortress, glorying in her buildings, and widely known for her riches. Her happy position, her pleasant olimate, the gifts showered on her by nature, the added charms of art, had given her a place among the fairest, strongest, and most renowned cities of Europe."1

The peculiar charm possessed by the remnants of the Latin East, that East which has witnessed the rule of Crusading knights and the splendour of Frankish merchant princes, is of a rare and subtle kind, the offspring of oriental nature and medieval western art. It lies

if the attempt to define so elusive a thing may be permitted-in Gothic architecture blending with Saracenic be

neath a Mediterranean sky, in the courts of ruined castles overgrown with deep green cypresses, in date-palms rearing their stately crowns above some abbey's traceriedoloisters, in emblazoned flamboyant mansions illumined, as they could never be in the West, by the golden haze of the Levant. The most compact relic of the Latin East is Rhodes-Rhodes whose fortifications, one of the mightiest monuments which medieval military art has produced, enolose what has been said to be the most perfect specimen extant of a fifteenth-century French town. And happily, though the Latin East is disappearing amid the upheavals of recent years, the glories of Rhodes are likely to be endowed with a new lease of life. Italy's national device, the letters F.E.R.T., mysterious emblem of the Annunziata, are generally held to represent the words fortitudo ejus Rhodum tenuit ; and the Italians of to-day, mindful of the exploits of the Langue of Italy in Carian waters and Carian isles, are carefully preserving throughout the Dodecanese the traces of the great Order, to whose renown their forebears contributed their share. In Syria there survives nothing so well preserved as Rhodes; but the vestiges of the Crusading prinoipalities have not yet vanished completely. There is the town of Tartus, growing out of the Crusading castle of Tortosa like Spalato out of Diocletian's palace. There are the Hospitallers' mighty fortresses of Safita and Merqab and Krak

des Chevaliers, the latter now the capital of a district under the name of Qal'at el-Hosn. There are the castles of Belvoir and Blanchegarde, Baniyas and Sahioun, Château Pélerin and La Pierre du Desert, testifying even in their decay to the skill and vigour of their builders.

Less military than the chateaux-forts of Syria, more domestic, too, than the knightly stronghold of Rhodes, Nicosia probably is still, despite the changes and accretions of recent years, the most typical example of a Latin Eastern town. If you approach it from the south by the Larnaca road, it is hidden from sight until you are within a mile or two of it by intervening ridges of hill. Then, when you have topped the rise, whence in 1570 the Turks launched their last successful assault, there is suddenly revealed to you, lying in a little hollow, what seems to be a city of dreams. Like Damascus as seen in springtime from the eastern slopes of Hermon, a white city girt in a belt of brilliant verdure, so is Nioesia engarlanded in green, in a cincture of pine, cypress, and eucalyptus, growing from the medieval fosse by which it is encompassed. No longer flooded with the waters of the Pedias, when, after the winter rains, that mountain torrent tumbles headlong from the hills above Machaera, the moat of Nicosia has become a flourishing plantation, a delightful bower for the walls and for the city within them. Above the trees, as you look from the ridge, appear

the Venetian ramparts, a perfect circle, with their eleven bastions set at regular intervals. Enclosed by this double ring of green trees and goldenbrown masonry lies Nicosia, a medley of churohes and mosques, of medieval palaces and Turkish qonaqs, of datepalms and orange groves, Gothic turrets and Saracenio minarets. Precisely in the middle of the town stands its noblest and most arresting monument, S. Sophia, once the cathedral of the Lusignan kings and now the principal mosque of Cyprus. Harmonious in its proportions and beautiful in its details, this glorious building dominates not only the town but the entire vicinity; while its twin minarets that rise, slender and graceful, from two unfinished Gothio towers, embody in this combination the very essence of the Latin East.

It happens only too often that towns, which at a distance wear the beauty of enchantment, surrender something, at any rate, of that beauty on closer acquaintance. The charm of the ensemble is dissolved by propinquity; sordid details, unobserved from afar, obtrude themselves on approach with vexing persistence. The latter, moreover, being of ruder stuff, produce the more enduring more enduring effeot, shattering the delicate illusion of the distant view,

all too fragile to be re-created. Happily Nicosia is one of those rare places where anticipations may be realised to the full. Cross the mile or so which still separates you from the walls, and you find yourself at the Caraffa bastion, beside which the Porta Giuliana,1 or Famagusta Gate, a deep and vaulted gallery, yawns cavernous and black. ous and black. Plunge by means of this tunnel 88 romantic an entrance to & city as you could wish to see-through the thicknesses of the ramparts, and you emerge in the most pioturesque of towns, filled with folk as picturesque as itself. Orthodox peasants from neighbouring villages, in top-boots and baggy breeches, are driving in their donkeys, laden with bales of fragrant throumbi2 for sale in the bazaars. Longhaired cassooked priests are sitting under the trellis of a coffee-shop, pulling vigorously at their narghilés. Turkish ladies, heavily veiled, pick their way daintily across the muddy streets; others look down from projecting balconies of lattice, which the Turks call shahnishin, "the place for the king to sit." Elderly khojas, in fur-lined gowns and white turbans, pass solemnly by, fingering the tessbih, or conversation beads, which hang like rosaries from their wrists. Grave Turkish merchants squat cross-legged