--has rather a pleasant taste about it.

It is over and paid for. Let us mingle with the sixteen thousand
inhabitants of the Georgian capital. Let us lose ourselves in the
labyrinth of its streets, among its cosmopolitan population. Many Jews
who button their coats from left to right, as they write--the contrary
way to the other Aryan peoples. Perhaps the sons of Israel are not
masters in this country, as in so many others? That is so, undoubtedly;
a local proverb says it takes six Jews to outwit an Armenian, and
Armenians are plentiful in these Transcaucasian provinces.

I reach a sandy square, where camels, with their heads out straight,
and their feet bent under in front, are sitting in hundreds. They used
to be here in thousands, but since the opening of the Transcaspian
railway some years ago now, the number of these humped beasts of burden
has sensibly diminished. Just compare one of these beasts with a goods
truck or a luggage van!

Following the slope of the streets, I come out on the quays by the
Koura, the bed of which divides the town into two unequal parts. On
each side rise the houses, one above the other, each one looking over
the roof of its neighbors. In the neighborhood of the river there is a
good deal of trade. There you will find much moving about of vendors of
wine, with their goatskins bellying out like balloons, and vendors of
water with their buffalo skins, fitted with pipes looking like
elephants' trunks.

Here am I wandering at a venture; but to wander is human, says the
collegians of Bordeaux, as they muse on the quays of the Gironde.

"Sir," says a good little Jew to me, showing me a certain habitation
which seems a very ordinary one, "you are a stranger?"

"Quite."

"Then do not pass this house without stopping a moment to admire it."

"And why?"

"There lived the famous tenor Satar, who sang the _contre-fa_ from his
chest. And they paid him for it!"

I told the worthy patriarch that I hoped he would be able to sing a
_contre-sol_ even better paid for; and I went up the hill to the right
of the Koura, so as to have a view of the whole town.

At the top of the hill, on a little open space where a reciter is
declaiming with vigorous gestures the verses of Saadi, the adorable
Persian poet, I abandon myself to the contemplation of the
Transcaucasian capital. What I am doing here, I propose to do again in
a fortnight at Pekin. But the pagodas and yamens of the Celestial
Empire can w