stamp of European dragoon sword, and more like child's toys than weapons for men; the inefficiency of their officers is something unspeakable; and, as a natural result, the whole force is, as far as regards fighting, demoralised and useless. What the Bashi-Bazouks are, I have already shown.

"Braves, obéissans, sobres"-"sobres dans leur vivres"-"très-exacts au silence, à la prière, au respect pour leur officiers"- "d'un corps sain et robuste" so Montecuculi, writing two centuries ago, describes the Turkish soldier of his day; and so, I think, the Turkish regulars of the present day may fairly enough be described. But it is the rank and file alone that are worthy of any respect; for the utmost that can be said in favour of the officers is, that the best of them are not inferior to the soldiers whom they command. And here it must be stated that, in the lower grades, officers of the Turkish service hold a position very different from that held by men of corresponding rank in an European army. Up to the rank of Captain inclusive they are usually raised from the ranks, and are in no respect whatever superior to the privates from amongst whom they have been chosen. They know, I believe, the practical part of their duty, as an English corporal might; in all else they are excessively ignorant, to the extent of being generally unable to read or write. In appearance they are slovenly to the last degree, and, with stained and shabby clothes, with most of their buttons off and all the rest unbuttoned, and the dirtiest of shirts showing beneath, present a generally dirty dishevelled "tumbled" appearance, which in more civilised countries is indicative of a man who has slept for a week in his clothes without taking them off. In social standing they scarcely hold the place of English non-commissioned officers. A Turkish captain in presence of his colonel stands at attention, salutes at every word, and perhaps gets a cuff on the head after all; while for the great man to ask him to sit down or to offer him any civility, simply because he is a ca would be unheard of. I hase men

are not superior to the common soldiers, they are, at all events, not inferior, and to this extent may be held to be better men than their military superiors. From the Bimbashi or Major upwards the Turkish officer is a man of a different class. He has not, as a rule, worked his way by military service, but owes his position to family interest, to having been a pasha's pipe-bearer or worse, and to every kind of more or less disreputable favouritism; and is not only perfectly incompetent in a military point of view, but, in common with everything in the Turkish Empire calling itself a gentleman, may be classed, I do believe, amongst the most demoralised and worthless beings of the earth. As for Turkish generals, such as I have met with are (viewed as soldiers) downright idiots.

But a number of men, not Turkish-born, hold rank in the Turkish service. Poles, Hungarians, members of every oppressed nationality on the face of the earth, flock hither, martyrs (according to their own account) to their devotion to their country's cause; and, apostatising as a preliminary, are admitted, by what influence I do not quite understand, to commissions in the Turkish army. Many of these are worthless, both as men and as soldiers; but yet amongst them are to be found some few good officers, and probably some honest men whose only crime has been that of fighting for their country, and who have been driven to Islam by downright starvation and misery.

One of the best was Murad Bey; now Murad Pasha. I have concealed his real name, for he might not admire having it held up to public admiration. He was a Pole; a thin, driedup, fiery-looking old man, with a grizzled beard and the air of an ancient hussar officer; had fought in Spain, Portugal, Algiers, and every country, I think, where blows were going, and he could thrust his head in the way of them; and now, with the rank of colonel of cavalry, was set, nominally as second in command, to dry-nurse and hold the real command over a boy-pasha to om the Turks had chosen to intr what important post. He

swear, and (where was there ever a Continental that couldn't?) draw the long bow stoutly; for all that, he was a soldier and a gentleman, and, as a natural result, was thwarted and hampered at every turn by the imbecile Turks; for whom, especially for such as belonged to the cavalry branch of the service, he used to nourish the profoundest contempt. Groaning, sighing, and swearing all in a breath, he used to say that the Turkish cavalry officers "font pitié à tout le monde." What with mental wrath and bodily sickness-for he was suffering from a fever all the time we knew him-the Bey had hard times of it. We used to find him lying in bed in his wretched Zemlik, with his face to the wall and his back to the world, vouchsafing in answer to all questions something between a groan and a gasp, and huddling himself up in the bed-clothes with the air of a man who is going to die and won't be hindered. Then he would turn to the front, and gaze round with a dim, dizzy, restless look of pain, like a sick old lion, drop on his pillow with a grunt, collect his faculties and curse the Turkish idiots in command, drink a little raki, then a little more, then a good deal, and finally, after execrating and reviling his military superiors in every variety of expression, would feel a little better, and become mildly resigned, and even facetious. I really believe the old gentleman was seriously ill, and the above, as far as I saw, was the only medical treatment he ever indulged in. In his latter or resigned state, he used to be fond of expounding to us his sensations with reference to his divers "goes" of raki. "Le premier est très-mauvais," says he, putting on an awful face of disgust to express the violence done to his feelings in getting it down: "le second est un peu mieux et après cela" (and here his countenance breaks out into irrepressible radiance) "ça va comme des traîneaux!" The only part of his statement which I ever felt inclined to doubt was the first clause.

I need not be at the pains of concealing the name of our particular friend Yacoub-Ah, valiant leader of Bashi-Bazouks- that is, he would have led if his men would have con

sented to follow-for he, poor man, is dead and gone, and little likely to be troubled in spirit by anything I may say of him. He was a grim-looking, red-mustached Pole, with a pugnose and Calmuck features; brave, good-natured, and friendly; a gambler and a blagueur; and as ugly as he could well be, to look yet like a man and a soldier. He would sell you a horse if he could-in fact, did sell one to the Evening Faddle (whose majesty of appearance, when mounted thereon, I must do myself the pleasure of recording); and spoke a broken French so curiously imperfect that he really deserved the greatest credit for the extent and completeness of the crackers which he contrived to communicate to us through that defective medium. When I think of his achievements in this line; when I recall his figure, sitting the centre of an admiring throng, revealing to us in strict confidence the projected combinations of a tremendous battle which he declared was shortly about to come off, and the plan of which he announced himself—Yacoub-Ah, captain of Bashi-Bazouks to have conceived and propounded amidst the respectful applause of a circle of Turkish pashas assembled in council; I really don't know whether most to admire his imperturbable solemnity and audacious face or our credulity. The fact is, that man must believe something, and in default of rational subjects of belief will take to irrational; so we, having come all the way to Widdin on purpose to see a battle, were determined to believe through thick and thin that a battle there must be; and, sooner than surrender the hope, were ready to subscribe to any articles of faith that Yacoub-Ah might be pleased to propound.

He piqued himself upon never having apostatised; and though obliged to conceal the fact carefully from his men, gave us in private many proofs of Christianity over a cold sausage. "C'est une très-bonne chose que le Salami," says Yacoub-Ah, smacking his lips; and so saying he would get off his horse, with an intimation that he was going to study the plan of campaign for a few moments, plant a sentry over the door of a zemlik to

insure the privacy of his meditations, and then, diving with us into its subterranean depths, would regale himself on a big Bologna sausage, which one of us had smuggled in his pocket. For all which lingering virtues I trust the saints of the Catholic Church may have looked favourably on him!

One of the most amusing of our acquaintances was the gentleman with whom I had the honour of sleeping on the billiard-table. He was a long sallow Pole, observant and satirical, and full of ludicrous stories of his Turkish co-religionists. How far these tales were literally true-whether he ever allowed one to fall flat through a servile adherence to matter-of-fact I do not undertake to say; but, true or false, his stories were given with a knowledge and mimicry of Turkish manners that made them delightful to hear. At the risk of its falling flat at secondhand, I cannot resist telling one. A Turkish and a Russian officer, on some occasion of truce, had scratched up an acquaintance. As they sat together the conversation turned on the comparative perfection of discipline and obedience to which their respective troops had been brought. To give a specimen, the Russian calls in his orderly. "Ivan," says he, "you will go to such-and-such a tobacconist; you will buy an oke of tobacco; pay for it, and bring it home straight." Ivan salutes and goes. The Russian pulls out his watch. "Now, Ivan is going to the tobacconist; now he is there; now he is paying for the tobacco; now he is coming home; now he is on the stairs; now he is hereIvan!" Ivan comes in, salutes, and hands over the tobacco.

"Pek guzel," says the fat Turk, with a condescending bow, benignly half-shutting his eyes the while; "very nice indeed. But my orderly will do as much-Mustafa !

"Effendim!" says Mustafa, bursting into the room, and touching his chin and forehead in the curious double-action salute of the Turkish soldier. He receives the same directions, word for word, and departs. His master hauls out a gigantic turnip of a watch, such as Turks delight in, and proceeds, in imitation of the

on;

He used solemnly to vow that he had seen a Turkish officer tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to many blows of the stick; that the court was seized with a doubt as to which end of him should be operated that the attendant Molla, applied to for the solution of this difficulty, prayerfully turned over the leaves of his Koran till the light of religious inspiration burst on him in a flood, and he cried, "Sur le cul ;"-that, Turkish etiquette demanding that the culprit should offer himself a willing victim, the prisoner presented a stick and his latter end to the senior officer, saying with a pitiful attempt at cheerfulness, "Bouyouroun "will you be so kind ?"--that the said senior was so kind, and gratified him with a bastinado which all the members of the court in rotation, taking their cue with Oriental time-serving from their superior, emulously repeated. If any well-informed party, choke-full of knowledge of the Turkish service, should get up an indignation at this story, he had better go and have it out with the long Pole that invented it : I don't vouch for its truth.

These and a tall Courlandish bimbashi, perhaps as good a soldier as any, were the chief of our acquaintance. What the antecedents of all of them may have been, respectable or the reverse, I am not prepared to say; but they were very good fellows, and extremely hospitable. We spent many an evening which would have been pleasant if the fleas would have left us alone, in their smoky little zemliks, assisting them in what seemed to be the chief occupation of their peaceful moments-drinking tea. Voulez-vous un thé?" was the regular invitation whenever we exhibited ourselves; and "un thé,"

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encore un thé," and a good many more thés on the top of that, used to go down in a style that would have

delighted the Temperance Society, provided it had not known that this "the" was reasonably strong rumpunch made with tea instead of plain

water.

But if amongst these foreigners were good men, the mass were charlatans, scamps, and useless braggarts, such as I should think were rarely collected in any one body before. As a specimen of the first, who that ever knew him will not think of the "medicin-en-chef," the Frenchman P.-"le bon vieux papa P.," as he called himself in his affectionate mo

ments, casting a paternal eye to the possibility of sticking you in a matter of baggage-ponies? I fancy I see him now; reclining at length amidst furs, one hand waving oratorically in the air as he expatiates with effusion upon his devotion to his profession, his greater devotion (which he allows to be excessive and fanatical) to the principle of Honour, and his manifold struggles and virtues in general. "Je suis le jalon de la France," says he. What that meant I never clearly knew; probably that he was a light to lighten the Gentiles, a missionary planted there by Providence to show the heathen to what sublime point the character of a Frrrançais could rise; and that in that barbarous land he held the whole honour of France in his keeping. He and France contrived to fall out though. For the venerable P., being then a Christian, took upon himself to turn Turk: Madame P., hearing of this at Constantinople, and objecting to the three additional Mesdames P. sanctioned by Mussulman law, went off " réclamer" at the French Embassy; and the last thing we heard of the "bon vieux papa" was, that the Embassy was hauling him over the coals fiercely, and that, fez on head, with the aspect of an ancient Turk and the manners of the sprightliest of old Frenchmen, the venerable convert was gallantly bearing up against what seemed a pretty fair prospect of being torn to pieces between his old wife and his new religion.

The "jalon," by the way, abode at Schoumla. He had, however, a halfbrother at Kalafat. The latter, a Bimbashi in I forget what regiment

of cavalry, was a man of portly and imposing presence, with a superaffectation of military carriage and soldierly manners; and had the reputation (a stupendous one, when you come to reflect upon it) of being one of the biggest talkers and smallest doers in the Turkish service. One day as we were at dinner he came in fresh from a reconnoissance, or some other of those military operations which give such scope for the combined intelligence and audacity of the light-cavalry officer, and had an air of stern indifference, as though he had just been firing off the whole of Decker's Petite Guerre, including M. Ravichio de Peretsdorf's preface and notes, on the Russians, but was too much used to that sort of thing to talk about it. We asked him to dinner, of course, and he sat down, champing his victuals and jerking out his sentences alternately, with an air of military decision grand to see. "Demain-champ, champ, champje fais un coup-de-main." ""God bless my soul!" says I, rather in a funk at my own daring, but screwing up my courage nevertheless-"may I, as a student of the art, assist at so instructive a military operation? And may I inquire the nature of the intended coup-de-main?" He bowed with an air of high military courtesy, champing the while so sternly that I felt that the Moscovs had no chance at all with him. "Dans le village de

champ, champ, champ-il y achamp, champ-cinq cents cochons !" And how many Russians to take care of them? None.

"Les officiers de cavalerie Turque font pitié à tout le monde," as Murad Bey said; and those that foreign powers used to send to help them, did not always mend the matter. While we were at Kalafat, two Frenchmen, "çi-devant" officers in the French cavalry, arrived, kindly spared by their own government to the Turks as instructors in the art of equitation to the Turkish cavalry. I remember thinking, before I saw them, that they had need be skilful suckers of eggs before they proceeded to instruct their Turkish grandmothers, who, if they can do nothing else in the world, can at least ride. But I never contemplated the strik

ing exhibition they actually made. The men, simply and absolutely, could not ride at all. We got one of them out one day, mounting him on an English-pattern hunting-saddle. We had not gone far before, sacréing enough to blow up a powder-magazine, he announced, with a plainspeaking born of extreme emergency, that if we didn't stop he should tumble off flat. Somebody changed saddles with him, giving him a hussar saddle this time, and we cantered off serenely; but a fresh explosion soon drew our attention to the fact that Monsieur l'Instructeur was in a fair way of tumbling off that too; in short, we saw strong reason to doubt whether the saddle was yet made that he could ride on, and, maturely weighing the circumstances, decided that he was the worst horseman in the world, with the one exception of Spero Flamboyales.

My respect for French horsemanship is small. I found my opinion not merely on the performances of these men, who were extreme cases, but on subsequent observations on French officers at large. Contrary to the practice of the Englishman and the Bedouin, who usually travel at a walk, and on an emergency take to the gallop as a duck takes to the water, the Frenchman is always blazing away at a furious gallop, sitting with the air of a man doing a cunning feat of balancing, and looking quite proud of his own cleverness. This severe treatment tells, as may be expected, on his horse's legs. I remember a French "ordonnance," or soldier-servant, bringing me a stout barb which he wished to sell for his master. The animal's legs were so enlarged by splents that they were. literally cylindrical; of equal size all round, just like pillars. The "ordonnance" looked on these big legs with extreme satisfaction; and pointing them out to me with pride, com

mended his beast in these terms, "Qu'il est solide!"

In the midst of the curious scenes which the Turkish camp presented to us, we were greatly refreshed by the sight of an English gentleman of character and position, conducting himself as such, and steering his way amongst the ungodly crew that surrounded him with an avoidance and horror that would have done him credit in his native country. We had, on I forget what occasion, a grand dinner. All the most distinguished reprobates of Widdin and Kalafat assisted. Our respected friend the Englishınan was there too. "Doctors without diplomas, officers without commissions," he muttered, privily casting glances of disgust on the assembled guests; and so saying he intrenched himself between two of our party, and sat gathering up his skirts to preserve them from defiling contact. Que diable vient-il faire dans cette galère?" thought I.

As for the rest of us, we were not troubled with similar scruples. Finding ourselves, as the French proverb says, amongst wolves, we set to and howled with right good-will. All our dearest friends were renegades and refugees; men who, whether right or wrong, would have got hanged in their own country; so, of course, we swam charmingly with the current of public feeling, and in all our intercourse with them tacitly acknowledged renegadism, and the certainty of being hanged in one's own country, as the standard of moral feeling. And I am not sure but that we were right in economising any expressions of virtuous indignation. It is one thing for a man, fat and comfortable, to hold to his religion; another thing to hold