ing of
the moment, if we may credit report, for he is said to have exclaimed--

"He is the greatest general of the age, for he has saved the honour of
his country: I will proffer him my hand and tell him so."

"So," thought I, when afterwards meditating on this subject, "the Turks
have for centuries proved themselves to be utterly unworthy of
self-government; they have shown themselves to be ignorant of the first
principles of righteousness,--_meum_ and _tuum_; they (or rather their
rulers) have violated their engagements and deceived those who trusted
them; have of late repudiated their debts, and murdered, robbed,
violated, tortured those who differed from them in religious opinions,
as is generally admitted,--nevertheless now, because one of their
generals has shown somewhat superior ability to the rest, holding in
check a powerful enemy, and exhibiting, with his men, a degree of
bull-dog courage which, though admirable in itself, all history proves
to be a common characteristic of all nations--that `honour,' which the
country never possessed, is supposed to have been `saved'!"

All honour to the brave, truly, but when I remember the butcheries that
are admitted, by friend and foe of the Turk, to have been committed on
the Russian wounded by the army of Plevna (and which seem to have been
conveniently forgotten at this dramatic incident of the surrender),--
when I reflect on the frightful indifference of Osman Pasha to his own
wounded, and the equally horrible disregard of the same hapless wounded
by the Russians after they entered Plevna,--I cannot but feel that a
desperate amount of error is operating here, and that multitudes of
mankind, especially innocent, loving, and gentle mankind, to say nothing
of tender, enthusiastic, love-blinded womankind, are to some extent
deceived by the false ring of that which is not metal, and the falser
glitter of a tinsel which is anything but gold.

However, Osman did not come after all. He had been wounded, and the
Russian generals were obliged to go to a neighbouring cottage to
transact the business of surrender.

As the cavalcade rode away in the direction of the cottage referred to,
a Russian surgeon turned aside to aid a wounded man. He was a tall
strapping trooper. His head rested on the leg of his horse, which lay
dead beside him. He could not have been more than twenty years of age,
if so much. He had carefully wrapped his cloak round him. His carbine
and sabre