strength, which inspired awe in my labourers and made them blindly obey him; each of them received 150 francs monthly. As third overseer I engaged Mr. Gustav Battus, son of the late French Consul Battus at the Dardanelles, with 300 fr. monthly wages. Fortunately, in June, 1879, I had left a Turkish watchman at Hissarlik, to guard my wooden barracks and the magazine, in which were stored all my machinery and implements for excavating. Thus I now found everything in the best order, and had only to cover my houses with new waterproof felt. As all of them were built in one continuous line, the danger of fire was great. I therefore separated them and put them up in different places, so that, in case one of the barracks caught fire, none of the others could be reached by the flames, even with the heaviest storm blowing. The barrack in which I and my servants lived had five rooms, two of which I occupied; another had two, a third had three, and a fourth had four bedrooms. We had, therefore, ample room, and could also conveniently lodge seven visitors. One barrack, of only one room, served as a dining-hall, and was called by that proud name, though it consisted of rude planks, through whose crevices the wind blew incessantly, so that frequently it was impossible to burn a lamp or light a candle. Another large barrack served as a store for the antiquities, which were to be divided between the Imperial Museum at Constantinople and myself. My honoured friends, Messrs. J. Henry Schröder & Co., of London, had kindly sent me a large supply of tins of Chicago corned beef, peaches, the best English cheese, and ox-tongues, as well as 240 bottles of the best English pale ale.[1] We could always get fresh
- ↑ I was the sole consumer of these 240 bottles of pale ale, which lasted me for five months, and which I used as a medicine to cure constipation, from which I had been suffering for more than thirty years, and which had been aggravated by all other medicines, and particularly by the mineral waters of Carlsbad. This pale-ale-cure proved perfectly effectual.
