an and contemptible action that may lurk
beneath the uniform of a Russian officer. Russian officers as a general
thing, however, it is but fair to add, would show up precisely the
reverse of this fellow, under similar circumstances, being genial and
hospitable to a fault; still, I venture that in no other army in the
world, reckoning itself civilized, could be found even one officer
capable of displaying just such a spirit as this.

The unwelcome music of pattering rain and flowing water in the concert I
have to sit and listen to all the forenoon, and a glance outside is
rewarded by the dreariest of prospects. The landscape as seen from my
lone and miserable lookout, consists of gray mud-fields and gray
mud-ruins, wet and slimy with the constant rains; occasional
barley-fields mosaic the dreary prospect with bright green patches, but
across them all--the mud-flats, the ruins, and the barley-fields--the
driving rain sweeps remorselessly along, and the wind moans dismally.
There is only one corner of my room proof against the drippings from the
roof, and through the wretched apologies for doors and windows the
driving rain comes in. Everything seems to go wrong in this particular
place. I obtain tea and sugar, but there is no samovar, and the
chapar-jee attempts to make it in an open kettle; the result is sweetened
water, lukewarm and smoky. I then send for pomegranates, which turn out
to be of a sour, uneatable variety; but worse than all is the dreary
consciousness of being hopelessly imprisoned for an uncertain period.

It grows gradually colder, and toward noon the rain changes to snow; the
cold and the penetrating snow drive me into the shelter of the
ill-smelling stables. It blows a perfect hurricane all the afternoon,
accompanied by fitful squalls of snow and hail, and the same programme
continues the greater part of the night. But in the morning I am thankful
to discover that the wind has dried the surface sufficiently to enable me
to escape from my mud-environed prison and its uncongenial associations.

Before getting many miles from Mazinan, I encounter the startling novelty
of streams of liquid mud, rolling their thick, yellow flood over the
plain in treacly waves, travelling slowly, like waves of molten lava. The
mud is only a few inches deep, but the streams overspread a considerable
breadth of country, as my road is some miles from where they leave the
mountains, and they seem to have no well-defined channe