Cross railway station, some
seventeen years ago, until now, I have never seen the military gentleman
from Chicago at whose instance I went out to watch the events of the
Russo-Turkish war. When I got home again, a month after the fall of
Plevna, I made inquiries about him, and learned that he had exceeded his
instructions, and that if he had followed the directions laid upon him
by his proprietors he himself would have gone out to the seat of war.
What object he proposed to himself in shirking that duty, and in sending
out a man whose salary he could not pay, I never definitely learned.

For quite a considerable time I used to call day by day at the Ottoman
Bank to ask if remittances had arrived, and so long as my funds lasted
I used to bombard that recalcitrant Yankee colonel with telegrams
insisting on the fulfilment of his contract. He took no notice of my
messages, and in a very little while things began to look desperate. It
was a great thing to be on the spot, however, and after some three weeks
of fruitless anger and bitter anxiety I found casual work to do under
a gentleman who had constituted himself the agent of an old-fashioned
London weekly. I wrote an article for this journal, entitled 'In a State
of Siege,' got money down for it, and lived carefully on it for some
ten days. At the end of that time, I was strolling rather disconsolately
round the Concordia Gardens at night-time, when I came upon a group of
men with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. They were seated round
a little table, drinking vishnap and lemonade, and chattering gaily
amongst themselves. One of them called me to join the party, and
another, whom I knew to be acting as agent for the _Scotsman_, was
reading a newspaper. We talked indifferently for a while; and the
reader, laying down his journal on the table, set his hand upon it
with a solid emphasis and said, 'If I could find the man who wrote that
article, I should ask him to go to the front at once.'

I glanced at the open sheet, and, lo! the article was mine. I said so,
and in ten minutes I had made a bargain. I was to go up country at the
earliest possible moment; and received instructions as to how to proceed
in application for the necessary _teskerai_, a form of passport or
safeguard without which no stranger was allowed to enter the interior.
The search after that abominable _testerai_ delayed me for many days,
and I danced attendance on Said Pasha (English Said as he was called