Universe, our salvation by Christ, why
don't you charge for these as well! Here's sixpence to buy yourself a
drink."

The driver takes the sixpence and looks at it, makes a calculation,
and then blurts out:

"What! Sixpence for a man and tenpence for a horse; ai, ai, what a
_barin_ I have found. Sixpence for a man and tenpence for a horse. Bad
news, bad news! Cursed be the day...."

Here you give him another sixpence, and get out of earshot quickly.

A penny a mile a horse. It is good pay in the Caucasus, and I for my
part charge myself only a halfpenny a mile. If I walk twenty-five
miles, then I allow myself a shilling wages, and, of course, some of
that I save for the occasion when I come into a town with a great
desire for good things. Then a spending of savings and a feast!

"Good machines use little fuel," said an emaciated tramp to me one
day. But I have no ambition to be accounted a good machine on those
terms. I eat and drink anything that comes in my way, and am ready
at any moment to feast or to fast. I seldom pass a crab-apple tree
without tasting its fruit, or allow myself to pass a mountain stream
without drinking.

Along this Black Sea road in the autumn it would be impossible to
starve, so lavish is Nature of her gifts. Here are many wild fruits,
plums, pears, blackberries, walnuts, grapes, ripening in such
superfluity that none value them. The peasant women pick what they
need; the surplus is allowed to fall and rot into the soil.

I made my way to Ghilendzhik through miles of wild fruit-trees ranged
in regular order. It is said that once upon a time when this territory
belonged to Turkey, or even before then, the land was laid out in
orchards and vineyards, and there was not a square foot uncultivated.

I ate of wild pears and kisil plums. The pears were more the
concentrated idea of pears than that we take from gardens; the kisil
plums, with which the bushes were flaming, are a cloudy, crimson fruit
with blood-like juice, very tart, and consequently better cooked than
raw. My dictionary tells me that the kisil is the burning bush of the
Old Testament, but surely many shrubs claim that distinction.

It was a glorious walk over the waste from Kabardinka to Ghilendzhik,
with all manner of beauty and interest along the way. I left the road
and cut across country, following the telegraph poles. In front of me
fat blue lizards scuttled away, looking like little lilac-coloured
_dachshunds_; silent