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perspective of untenanted seats, the proprietors of which are otherwise engaged.

Our evening promenade is almost as solitary as our meal, for a furious squall of wind and rain clears the deck of all but our friend the Englishman, who, in full panoply of Macintosh, defies the storm with true John Bull combativeness, and (as Ossian has it) "hums a surly song as he walks, like the noise of a falling stream." But, as usual on the Black Sea, the next morning is one of its "special days"-a bright sun, a smooth sea, and a soft wind, putting life into the most nerveless of the martyrs below stairs, and bringing them on deck in a body.

Is there any enjoyment, after all, like being at sea on a fine day-the clear blue sky overhead, the tiny wavelets dancing in the sunlight, the fresh breeze quickening your pulse and whetting your appetite, perfect quiet all around, no post to bring you unpleasant letters or disappoint you by bringing none, and all the struggles, and worries, and anxieties of shore-life left behind like a dream. Would one be any better off, on a morning like this, in a stuffy compartment, jammed into a mass of grumbling passengerschanging one's posture incessantly, and every time for the worse, till the very sense of having a body at all becomes an intolerable grievance-awakened just as one has fallen asleep by a seemingly wanton demand for tickets on the part of an unfeeling guard-listening in sullen despair to the deep, rhythmical, unbroken snoring of your companions, with the certainty that,

next morning, they will all abuse you for "keeping them awake all night with that horrid row,”—and getting out about daybreak with an unwashed, uncombed, un-everything feeling of discomfort and misanthropy, beside which Timon of Athens would have been an absolute Peabody. Not without reason, indeed, did the brave old sailor slightingly pronounce terra firma to be "a good enough place for a day or two." And so the great panorama rolls on. Novorossisk and Tuapsé, dotted like chessmen over the huge purple ridges that rise, wave above wave, into the very sky; dainty Soukhoum, a little nook of Italian scenery nestling in the lap of the everlasting hills, which stand over it like some weather-beaten veteran with his children at his feet; till at length, just before sunset on the sixth day of our voyage from Odessa, the long, low bank of the Rion rises above the sea like a brooding mist, and the white peaks of the Anatolian mountains glimmer along the southern sky.

The relative position of Poti and Batoum is another instance of that untoward destiny which has made Russia, turn which way she will, a spectator of advantages which she cannot share. On one side an irreclaimable morass and a miserable anchorage; on the other, a fine harbour, which, walled off as it is from the rest of Lazistan by a range of mountains, ought to belong to Russia. Unfortunately it happens to belong to Turkey; and the civilizers of mankind, after eight costly and laborious years of vain effort to convert the gutter on which Poti stands into a tolerable harbour,

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naturally begin to cast longing eyes upon Batoum. For more than a year the Russian journals have been repeating, first indirectly, and then point-blank, that the Turkish port must be had coûte qui coûte—a suggestion not likely to fall upon unfruitful ground among the men who, while lording it over half Asia and two-thirds of Europe, are kept under arrest in their own dominions by the shackles of the Sound and the Bosphorus.

I will not describe my exploration of the town, which even Mr Murray's Koran in red binding could hardly transform into a place "where the passing tourist may spend a pleasant hour." A blue book would probably sum it up as follows: "Local products, ⚫ fever and cholera; population, frogs; revenue, varying according to the success of the overcharges; manners, none; customs, very hard to pass with luggage; chief article of use, quinine; internal communication, impossible; government, every man for himself, and the devil for all." And when, at four o'clock next morning, I tramp out under the pouring rain, along a road seemingly modelled after the Slough of Despond-fight my way to the ticket office through a spongy mass of wet Georgians and Imeritines, and get into the train splashed and dripping from head to foot, I am fully consoled for all discomforts by getting fairly away from Poti.

It must be owned, however, that the Poti-Tiflis railway, unlike things in general, shows its worst points at the outset. As far as Tcheladid, the whole country is a drowned jungle, enlivened by a "chorus of frogs

that would have gladdened the heart of Aristophanes ; but as we advance, the ground becomes higher and firmer-long, low ranges of hills begin to lift themselves against the sky-the bright sunshine of a spring morning replaces the ghostly mist that broods over the fatal morasses of the Rion-and the genuine Caucasus rises before us in all its splendour.

Sitting at home in England, and reading of Caucasian post-roads and Caucasian railways, it is diffi cult to remind oneself that this quiet region, which a passing tourist may traverse as safely and commodiously as Saxony or the Tyrol, was so recently the scene of one of the bloodiest and most protracted struggles recorded in history; but here, shut in by black broken crags of immeasurable height, with the river lashing itself into foam far below, and just space enough between the precipice above and the precipice beneath for our train to slide past, one begins to realise what the conquest of such a region must have been. The march of an army through such defiles (which are as nothing to the grisly gorges of Northern Daghestan) encumbered with wounded and pursued by an implacable enemy, with a fire-flash from behind every bush, and the whole mountain-side alive with the crack of the fatal rifles-would be grim work. To those who question the fighting power of the Russian soldier, there is one sufficient reply: "He conquered the Caucasus."

And so we fare on our way, amid strange alternations of scenery-now gliding under the shadow of mighty

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cliffs that seem already toppling to overwhelm us, and now rushing through a quiet little green valley, dotted with tiny log-huts-at one moment looking down into a yawning chasm, and the next, catching a glimpse of some ruined castle perched above the clouds. At length we come to a sudden halt in front of a long, low, rudely-built shed, planted on the only visible piece of level ground; and here passengers and baggage are disembarked en masse, as if the train had been stopped by brigands. What does this mean?

It means that the line has not yet shaken itself clear of its quarterly landslip; and that this long file of cars and waggons, drawn up at the foot of the great mountainwall, are to carry us across the twelve miles of magnificent scenery which lie between us and the second train that awaits us at Suram. Accordingly, I and three other victims squeeze ourselves into the foremost car-a rickety affair, all hoops and tarpaulin, like the skeleton of a starved cab-and go zig-zagging up the great ascent over a road which, to do it justice, can hardly be matched out of Britain. For here, as in the Highlands of Scotland and the Western States of America, men have learned that spade and pickaxe are surer engines of warfare than bayonet and cannon; and that the most warlike race on earth cannot long defend a country once fairly laid open by lines of communication.

Upward, ever upward-past green plateaus, and plunging torrents, and frowning rocks, and deserted hamlets-past creaking waggons drawn by broad-horned oxen, and flocks of pastured goats, which greet us with

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