eminences—the last spurs of the Balkan, which commanded the town and environs. Below was Rustchuck, which, like all Turkish towns, is a place of far greater extent than its forty or fifty thousand inhabitants would lead one to suppose,- —a wide semicircle of snow-roofed houses, broken with a lofty massive clock tower, and numerous slender minarets that bristled in the foreground. Beyond was the Danube glistening with large masses of ice floating to the sea,-further away rose Giurgevo with its Christian spires, and further still the dead flat white plains of Wallachia fading away in the distance.

As I returned towards the walls, the shades of evening fell; and the bells of Giurgevo, ringing in the Greek Christmas, chimed sweetly with the dull hoarse roar of the ice-laden Danube. To how many a poor conscript must this have recalled the warm hearts and familiar faces of the Kama and the Volga!

CHAPTER VIII.

RUSTCHUCK TO SILISTRIA.

From Rustchuck I went to Turtukai or Totrukhan, which is opposite Oltenitza-but the journey was any thing but pleasing; for a thaw had taken place after deep snow. The Wallachian shore on our left continued flat; the Bulgarian on our right was undulating and as we approached Totrukhan became mountainous and wooded;— the town itself is at the foot of a high steep hill next the Danube-but was anything but inviting, with six inches of black liquid mud in the streets, as if all the reserve stores of Day and Martin had been poured out on them; and every house, including the khan, was crowded to the door with troops, mostly Albanians,

keeping watch at this important post; which, besides its commanding position, is half way between Rustchuck and Silistria, being the centre of the Danubian base of the triangle formed by Shumla and these two other strong places.

Giafar Pasha, who commanded here, is an Albanian by birth, but a Moslem, and belongs to one of the old families in the environs of Corfu, having married a daughter of the well known Vely Pasha, son of Ali Pasha of Janina. Giafar himself had dabbled dangerously in politics, having a few years ago risen in revolt against the suppression of the feudal system, and the hereditary jurisdictions; but he was promoted for his brave conduct in holding the island of Mokanna against a far superior Russian force operating from Giurgevo after the affair of Oltenitza. I found him occupying a house with a pleasant situation, looking out on a garden that sloped precipitately to the Danube, and commanding a view across to the ruined quarantine and green sward of Oltenitza, and the wooded island at the confluence of the Argish with the Danube. In his outer rooms was a great retinue of Tcham Albanians, who are Moslems dressed in kilts of Manchester cotton, which has superseded the native fustanella. Being strongly recommended to him from Shumla and Rustchuck, he gave me a very kind reception, and I found him to be a man between forty and fifty years of age and of a pleasant social humour. He entered freely into his adventures and antecedents in those early days of his career before he wore a Nizam uniform, but had his native kilt and velvet jackets with suns and stars embroidered on his back and breast, and his first essay of arms had been, at eighteen years of age, in scaling with ladders, in the dead of the night, a castle which had been wrongfully taken from him during his minority; so that in our younger days feudal rapine, tyranny, romance and adventure, banished from prosaic bureaucratic encyclopedic Frangistan, vegetated in Turkey in Europe; now expelled from thence, it might be difficult to know where to find

them, except in the penny-novel and on the boards of the Theatres on the Surrey side of London or those of the Boulevard du Crime; and it certainly is not every day that even a traveller like myself,-who from time to time leaves his fireside for foreign lands,—falls in with the lord of a manor who has recovered a property by club law, after a night escalade, and executed a summary process of ejectment at not the most convenient hour for the outgoing tenant.

1

He showed me a wound in his leg received in the island of Mokanna after Oltenitza, which by this time had healed; and as we sat on the divan and conversed, the other Arnaout Captains and Cavasses stood in front of us, occasionally putting in a word, and giving an anecdote of their wounds, and informing me that they always apply cheese to their fresh wounds. Of those Captains, the one who had been guilty of the greatest atrocities on the march was the most grave, respectable, innocent looking man in appearance of the whole file of henchmen, constantly expressing himself as perfectly resigned to the Divine Will.

The horses were saddled and we then rode out to see the place. I seldom saw on my route hither a more commanding position than that of Turtukai; while the opposite part of Wallachia is a dead flat, the Bulgarian shore rises precipitously to a high ridge, from which one sees the whole of the field of the recent fight spread out as on a map. Snow having entirely disappeared during the thaw, every thing was green and bright. On the plateau above is a large redoubt, which secures the town from a force attacking it either from the east or west Danubian approach. This battery did nothing for the Turks on the day of Oltenitza, and is useful only as an aid to the naturally strong position of Turtukai itself. Looking across with the glass, I saw that the quarantine

His share in the Bosphorus conspiracy of 1859 is beyond the sphere of the present work.

is a complete ruin and that the Turkish entrenchments have been carefully destroyed by the Russians, the want of a similar precaution by the Turks after the first siege of Silistria having most materially contributed to the success of the second year's siege. The Cossacks were visible, cantering on the greensward on the other side of the river, who contented themselves at this stage of the proceedings with sending an occasional conical ball across to the lodgings of Giafar Pasha. To the east of the town is another battery commanding the whole breadth of the town.

The object of this little volume is not to give a history of the war; but as I am so near to Oltenitza, I may say that in this action the design of Omer Pasha was to give elbow room to Ismael Pasha at Kalafat: to distract and confuse the Russians about the real point at which a push was to be made, and at the same time to give confidence to his own troops; in all which he was fully successful.

Giafar Pasha gave me an escort to Silistria- one of his kilted Albanians, whose roomy great coat attracted my attention as inconsistent with the kilt, but he informed me that it was a Russian one, a spoil of Danubian warfare, and had belonged to some poor devil who has not recrossed the Pruth. He praised the present state of Albania, saying that a man might now travel through the country with a vase of gold on his head.-Through all the progress of my tour I heard proofs and saw signs that a very notable improvement had taken place in the police organization of the most turbulent and unsafe districts. He kept singing to himself the greater part of the way to Silistria, through a country which is beautiful in summer, every hill being wooded, but the valleys of which we found very marshy after the thaw.

CHAPTER IX.

SILISTRIA.

The first aspect of Silistria shews it to be a place of the first military importance. Every embrasure and palisade having been then fresh, tidy, and fit for work, while the heights are covered with forts that sweep every approach to this place, which even before the late siege was renowned beyond every other in the annals of Danubian warfare, with the single exception of Belgrade.

Having presented introductions from Mirza Pasha, the Governor general, to Ibrahim Pasha, the civil Governor, and from Omer Pasha to Mousa Pasha, the military Governor, I experienced a most kind reception, with every possible facility for seeing the place and acquiring information. There being no inn nor good khan in the place, I had lodgings assigned me in the house of the wealthiest Christian merchant in the town-a fine old fellow-short in stature and meagre in flesh-but with a black eye full of fire, and gestures full of vivacity, but without theatrical exaggeration. He was full of reminiscences of the Greek and Russian war and also of most uncomfortable experiences of those troubled times. Although a landsman, he was impressed as a sailor and put in irons-having in this state had to trudge thirty-three days on foot before he joined his ship, in which he had a rib broken at the battle of Navarino. I had a couple of rooms to myselfnicely fitted up in a semi-European manner. Every evening before bed time he made a social cup of tchai, a pleasant composite of tea, rum, lemon juice, beaten eggs, and sugar. This he had learned from the Russians during their long occupation of Silistria. The house being near the rampart, I all night through heard the sentinels calling to each other the Turkish "All 's well." The last accounts that I heard of my host in May, before leaving Bulgaria, were that he had sent all his family