XXVI. From Manikpur I went to Balloki. I found the Punjabi students more sympathetic, though not so nimble-witted or analytical as the Bengali. With them defeating the examiner was even more a question of learning text and commentary by rote. I had to steer them through the course as I had steered my candidate for Holy Orders who, with ten words of Greek, satisfied the examiners in his paper on the New Testament. Thanks to you," he wrote in the plenitude of his gratitude, "I have past my examination." 66 I owe this new reading of the passage in which the fallen Archangel, having " 'scaped the Stygian flood," apostrophises 66 the seat of desolation void of light" to a student of the First Arts class. As I had only joined the institution a week, the adaptation seemed appropriate. I took it as an address of welcome. Balloki was an escape from Manikpur. Here, "for my better entertainment," as old Ralph Fitch used to say, "I was clapt into a faire strong prison "for eight years. Prison is, perhaps, too strong a word for the penitentiary hours of routine in which my students and I murdered and dissected the English classics. Even the dissecting-room had its humours. And outside, on the cricket and football field, we were something like a fraternity. Besides, it was a glorious country to ride in. You could let a horse out almost anywhere, and I used to spend hours every week chivying black buck, nilghai, chinkara, and pig in the State preserves, or I would stalk them on foot and lie in the long grass as still as a stone and watch them. I had lost the faculty of shooting straight with the limb I left behind the other side of the watershed. I gradually dropped shikar-first the rifle, then the shot-gun. I suppose it is because I cannot shoot myself that I am in danger of becoming one of those earnest idealists who denounce shooting as cruel, like the temperance reformer who is "uncharioted by Bacchus and his pards." There was a time when a rare and blind felicity of hand and eye with a gun seemed to me the summum bonum of existence. Now I have grown to hate the idea of crumpling up little birds. This, I suppose, has come through the habit of watching them. The person I dislike most in my corner of France is the "sportsman" who has killed off all the blackbirds and thrushes, and haunts the beach and cliffs for sea-fowl. When I see him stalking my dunlins, those heavenly sprinters on the edge of the wave, I could demand his head on a charger. For months at a time every year, three months, sometimes four, I escaped from Balloki to the hills, to the snows and glaciers, or forests, or alpine marges. I have few regrets for the East. If I sometimes hunger for the Himalayas or Kashmir, it is not because they are of the East. I should be equally happy in the Pyrenees if I had legs to move in them. The gite I have found in France between the mountains and the sea is a very good substitute for "the terrestrial paradise." Committed by the medicos to the South, I have chosen the Western sea. The longer one has lived in the East the greater one's bias towards the pastoral. Better the Basque country than the Catalan, the Atlantic than the Mediterranean, a green world than a brown or yellow one. Instead of the gravelly cliffs and dry, stony, treeless watercourses of the Pyrénées Orientales, bare as nullahs in Jebel Hamrin, I have found a country of grassy ravines where the cuckoo flower grows hip-high, and is sometimes mistaken at a distance for a sown crop, where the moss in the roots of the oaks and beeches has a pleasant, earthy, damp smell with a suspicion of fish in it like a freshlycaught trout,-a delicious unAsiatic smell only known in these turfy home lands, and where one has barely five weeks to wait between the autumn crocuses and the first primroses. I have left the East behind; but these things, recurring in their season, renew youth annually. (Conclusion.) THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN IVAN KORAVITCH. LATE OF THE IMPERIAL RUSSIAN ARMY. BY VICTOR L. WHITECHURCH. V. HOW THE CAPTAIN ESCAPED FROM A KHIRGESE AMBUSCADE. CAPTAIN IVAN KORAVITCH Galicia in 1914. Alas! also, I was in the retreat. opened a new box of cigarettes. To see him doing it was noteworthy. With a quick gesture he tore off the covering paper, rolled it up in a ball, and tossed it across the room. Then with a polite bow and an entreating emphasis on the word "Please!" he offered the box to each man present, afterwards taking one himself, rolling it with his long quick-moving fingers, and lighting it with a peculiar shrug of the shoulders that spoke the word "content-awaited so many of our country ment as plainly as words. "You want another story? One more of what you are pleased to call my adventures? Pouf! They are nothing. The life of a soldier has necessarily a list of incidents. But one forgets so many of them. "Ah! Perhaps, though, I can tell you a leetle tale of the Great War. No, my friends, it is not a story of fighting with the Germans or Austrians. It deals with a phase of the war that is very little known to you English, and even what was reported in some of your newspapers at the time was misleading. "I have already told you I took part in the advance in landowners, but he saw what was coming. I remember he once said to me, 'Ivan, I shall not perhaps live to see the great trouble that is to arrive. But for our country-this war will be nothing in comparison.' "But it is not of this that I am about to speak. Partially I recovered my health, but I was as yet unable to return to fight. So about the close of 1915 I was sent to Omsk in Siberia, there to assist in the management of the great camps for German and Austrian prisoners of war that we had established. "Sometimes I laugh in my cheeks when I hear you English speak of Siberia. Often you seem to imagine it a sort of icy hell where all life is a hardship. But that is not so. Some of our best civilisation before the war was in Siberia, and Omsk is a fine town with its wide streets of black wood houses relieved by the brightcoloured cupolas of the many churches. Our prison camps also were very fine, all of them, of course, made of wood with double doors and windows, and plenty of our big Russian stoves to keep them warm. And we treated our prisoners very well. They always had good white bread on feast days-of which there are many in our Church. The Government supplied each one with clothes and boots, also a good padded greatcoat and a warm scarf. And, to keep them clean, each of them had a bath once a fortnight. Half of them were glad, but the other half had to be forced into it. Splendid! among our own officers and plenty also among the Austrian officers who were on parole. One almost forgot that a great war was in progress as the months went by. We used, of course, to read the reports in the newspapers, and also there would visit us those who had come from the parts where fighting proceeded, but we, who were so far away, were in peace. We worked a leetle and we played a leetle at cards, and made ourselves amusements. Splendid! All the same, sometimes I was very tired of this life. My wound now had quite healed, and I was restored to health. I wished once more to be on active service before the war should come to a finish. And then it was that my leetle adventure, as you are pleased to call it, took place. At Omsk I had become very friendly with a man for whom I had great regard, Vasily Dmitrich Martianoff. He was colonel of a regiment of Cossacks, or, rather, what remained of them, for they had fought in the Bukovina, and had suffered heavy loss. It was necessary that Cossacks should be quartered at Omsk, because at times there were troubles in some of the Siberian camps away from the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the Cossacks could always cover the ground quickly upon their horses. "Colonel Martianoff, he was a very fine fellow. A leetle taller than myself, with a great yellow beard. He could ride a horse-ah-splendid! Also he was a good swordsman, and a marksman with carbine or revolver. And he was as strong as one of his his own horses. Fatigue he scarcely ever felt. We became very great friends, and played much at cards. Money was not very plentiful, but such as we managed to get we kept on losing to one another several times in the week. Splendid! So it was natural we should become still more friends. Yes? "One night, it was quite late in the autumn of 1916, Vasily Dmitrich Martianoff came into my quarters. I was quite alone. At once I put some drinks and a pack of cards on the table, but he waved his hand and said— 66 6 when ? to you in your English miles, so that you can see for yourselves the distance. "He laughed at my astonishment as he lighted a cigarette. Then he said— Listen. I will make it plain to you. There is much trouble going on two or three hundred miles south of Tashkend. The Khirgese have risen against us, and already have killed many in the villages— especially those in the mining districts. They are devils. At one place they put to death forty-two little children in a school-all in one morning. Oh, yes, my friend, doubtless the rising is due to German propaganda, and it grows serious. There are not enough of our soldiers in the district to combat it. So I am ordered to take my Cossacks. Yes ? ' "I began to understand. I sprang to my feet, and clapped him on the back with my hand. 'Splendid!' I cried, for I was very excited. It is good,' I said, 'but you are a good rider and do not fear what is hard. I also Tomorrow morning at want a friend with me. So I five o'clock,' he replied. have without telling you first "That is very early. Do asked the commandant if he we ride far?' can spare you to accompany me, and he says you, then, come? ' his "A smile came into handsome face as he made answer 66 6 Yes." Will "My friends, you laugh at A thousand miles, my me because you say I am sometimes very excited. I suppose friend!' "I tell the measurement you would have laughed then. |