No questions are ever asked, and it has twice happened to me that I have lodged at a Greek convent during the most rigid fasts of the Church, when the inmates sat down to a dinner of herbs and dry bread, while to me was given the best their resources could compass--a roast lamb or kid, generally.

The _kalogeros_ in attendance, when I was dining on one occasion with the prior of a convent on Good Friday, and ate flesh when the prior himself had nothing but herbs and bread, turned to his superior with a perplexed smile, saying, "Why! he is not even a Christian!" but was none the less cordial afterward--he evidently had no other feeling than that of pity that a man who had been their protector (it was in Crete during the insurrection) should not enjoy the privileges of the Church.

This liberal hospitality on the part of the ecclesiastics makes the want of it on the part of the people all the more conspicuous and inexplicable.
In the event Comoundouros found his game of bluff a safe one, for his claims were just, and diplomacy was derelict, or there would have been no utility in the demonstration.

But the futility of the Greek threats was most conspicuously shown, for not a battalion got to the frontier in a condition to fight, and two batteries sent off from Athens in great pomp broke down so completely that not a gun was fit to go into action when they reached the frontier.

The (for them and for the moment) fortunate issue of the contention by the cession of the territory in dispute seemed to the Greeks in general due to their good military measures, and so confirmed them in the dangerous conviction that the powers were afraid that they might beat the Turks and open the question of Constantinople, etc., which the powers had determined should not be opened.