there before noon (it was now nearly ten, and I had twenty-five versts to do, a tired horse and a bad road). A slight fog-no doubt my willo'-the-wisp castle of the night before-had raised the temperature so that one had not the fear of losing one's nose before one's eyes. Still it was bitter cold, and I could not help asking myself again and again, "How can those wretched prisoners stand this ?" At last the answer came in the shape of the first detachment, and oh! what a sight! They looked like a regiment of corpses galvanised into action by the subtle demon of war in some merry moment of "glory." Their pinched features wore a fixed, stolid expression of hopeless misery; their gait was slow and hobbling, for most of them were suffering from frost-bite, and all of them made feeble endeavours to hold their tattered garments round their shivering limbs. Some of them were vainly endeavouring to bite the frozen bread; others actually threw it away as useless weight; and a few Asiatics who had probably never in their lives seen such a winter were contorting their features and jabbering incoherent words which nobody understood or even noticed they had lost their reason; the next night they lost their lives-they were frozen to death.* Eh, how sadly did I resume my own march! Here was misery, and I was powerless to alleviate it. I had hundreds of warm garments, but they had been bought with money especially subscribed for the Russian sick and wounded. I could not, of course, commit a breach of trust by applying funds subscribed for the Russians to the benefit of the wretched prisoners they had spared, although the enemy had massacred every Russian who had fallen into his barbarous hands. These poor wretches themselves admitted that the Russian and Roumanian soldiers who fell into Osman Pasha's hands were murdered in cold blood. And indeed Osman himself told me on the 21st of June 1877, when I had an interview with him at Adlie, on the Serbo-Bulgarian frontier, that he looked on the Roumanians as rebels, and as such he should execute them, and that he could not afford to keep Russian prisoners ("Ich bin nicht reich genug Russen zu ernähren!"). I had not gone far before I came upon a Turk crouching in the snow. I dismounted and spoke to him in Sclav, on the chance of his understanding me; but I got no answer, the poor fellow had spoken his last word. He had fallen out to rest and eat his breakfast, and had yielded to the drowsiness which extreme cold induces, and had thus dozed into his last sleep, still grasping in his stiff hand his frozen bread. Horrors thickened on me as I traced the prisoners' line of march, lined as it was at intervals with frozen corpses. Some of them * [Why did the Russians make them march unclothed through such a night? It was a march to the grave.-ED.] were stripped of their clothing, and others were mutilated by the hungry hogs and wild dogs. They culminated in a sickening spectacle—a sow and her litter dragging the viscera from a dead Asiatic. "Oh, heavens!" I exclaimed involuntarily to myself. "Were these poor wretches born to be food for swine?" And clapping my hand on my revolver I was just about to shoot the obscene beast, when the thought occurred to me that it was well for the living that these scavengers-the hogs, the dogs, and the vultures—should eat up the dead, and so prevent their putrefying bodies from breeding a pestilence. At twelve o'clock I reached Putiné, almost at the same moment as several waggons loaded with frozen corpses. The Russian delegate, besides succouring the living, had organised fatigue parties to bury the dead. He had distributed all the Russian stores and warm clothing amongst the Turkish prisoners, and begged hard for some of ours, but I felt bound to resist the temptation. I could not divert from the Russian sick and wounded money subscribed especially for them, and apply it to the Turkish prisoners whom they had spared in spite of the massacre of their own countrymen; though practically it would have come to the same thing, for after taking the instructions of our committee I handed over my stores to the Russian Red Cross, and they distributed them amongst the Turks. They put the matter to me thus: "Your friends are anxious to help us; we have taken all these prisoners, and with them the responsibility of doing our utmost to keep them alive; so that in helping them you assume a share of our responsibility, and thus you fulfil your own object of helping us." In justice to the Russians I feel bound to say that this magnanimity was by no means exceptional or confined to officials. I have often seen Russian soldiers share their rations with Turkish prisoners. And at Zimnitza I found an hospitalbarrack with fifty beds, thirty-five of which were occupied by Turkish wounded, whilst in the spaces between the beds Russian wounded were lying on the ground. Next day Dr. Sandwith arrived in a peasant-sledge with Mr. Villiers, of the Graphic, who afterwards published a sketch of " Dr. Sandwith on his Mission of Mercy," which gives a very good idea of the difficulties and discomfort of travelling in South Wallachia in mid-winter. Being thus relieved from work at Putiné, I set out for Zimnitza to visit the Russian hospitals there on my way to Turn-Maguerelli, where we had five English doctors. Zimnitza is only forty-five versts from Putiné as the crow flies, but as the Vede runs between, and as that river had overflowed its banks and was not fordable for thirty or forty versts from its mouth, a detour had to be made of about twenty versts, thus lengthening the journey to sixty-five versts. The way from Zimnitza to Turn was also lengthened to the same extent in a similar manner, and so my whole journey amounted to 110 versts each way, 220 versts there and back to Putiné, or 340 there and back to Bucharest (in all about 230 miles). Alexandra was not the worse for her accident of New Year's Eve, and we made the sixty-five versts to Zimnitza in seven hours, including stoppages. The way was dotted here and there with Turks in the snow, some singly, others in little groups of two, three, or four, huddled together for warmth. Most of them were dead and stiff, but I had the satisfaction of saving some who were still alive and putting them on sledges of the nearest Red Cross station. In not a few instances the cargoes of these sledges were found, on arriving at their destination, to be a mixture of living and dead! In one case I hastened to get warm soup for a couple of waifs I had picked up on the road; when I returned, one was lying dead in the other's lap! The sky was clear, and the sun, shining on the world of white, dazzled the eyes, but at intervals the sun was obscured by the immense flights of birds whom my approach disturbed from their breakfast of human flesh. At Zimnitza I found 2500 sick and wounded, including a large proportion of Turks, whom the Russian doctors and sisters of charity were tending in a way which brought tears of gratitude to the eyes of the rough barbarians, who could scarcely understand how delicate Russian ladies could dress their dirty and stinking wounds. Brave women were those daughters of noble Moscow and St. Petersburg families who left their comfortable and happy homes to work almost day and night in the rough barracks of the Red Cross hospitals. Not a small proportion of them sacrificed their lives to their self-imposed work of true charity, and nearly all fell victims to typhus. Of a brave little band of twenty sisters, sixteen were lying sick with typhus, and two dead of the same terrible disease. Those who only saw the Russian sisters when they were convalescent from typhus, taking the air in carriages in Bucharest, formed a very harsh opinion of them; but those who saw them, as I did, at their work, will never forget the courage, the tenderness, the devotion with which they tended the sick and wounded of friend and foe. Having handed to the delegates and sisters funds for comforts for the severest cases of the 2500 at Zimnitza and the 4000 patients that were lying on the other side of the Danube at Sistova (the river being at that time impassable), I pointed for Turn-Maguerelli. The road was wilder than ever, but a slight fall of snow had thrown a white mantle over those who slept only too well. The wind had not disturbed the covering which Nature had spread over the lonely dead, but the birds and beasts of prey had here and there soiled the pure white sheet with the blood of the bitter weather's victims. I was not sorry to reach Turn, where I was welcomed by our doctors, who found a comfortable bed for me and a warm stall for Alexandra. Their barrack was not full, and most of their patients were Turks whom they had literally "picked up" by the wayside, and thus snatched from a frozen grave. On consulting with them I found that owing to their not speaking the language of either Russians or Roumanians, and to the change of the line of march, and to other circumstances it is unnecessary to refer to, they were not at this time (although they had worked well and effectively at Plevna, as the Times' correspondent telegraphed at the time)—they were not doing as much good as they wished and strived to do, or as was commensurate with their expenses; I therefore made arrangements for their return home, which the committee readily ratified, as it released funds to be applied to the purchase of warm clothing and other comforts which the sick and wounded required at that time even more than surgeons and medicines. This arrangement concluded to the satisfaction of our doctors and myself, I retraced my steps, visiting all the hospitals and Red Cross stations on my line of march, and seeing everywhere a repetition of the scenes I have vainly attempted to describe, but which can only be realised in a hideous nightmare. I will not weary my readers with a repetition, but content myself with saying that in three days I was again in Bucharest, having completed my 230-mile "Ride through Snow and Death." The Politeness of Monsieur Prévost. In the library of Strasburg the curious reader may meet with a little volume bound in vellum, and edited by Armand Koening, of that city, in 1766, which is well worth the trouble of perusal. This little volume, entitled 'Elements of Politeness and Good Behaviour, or the Civility which is practised among People of Culture, with a new Treatise upon the Art of pleasing in Conversation,' throws more light upon the condition of society in provincial France during the time of Madame du Barry than all the romances and all the histories that were ever written to illustrate that curious epoch. Two shots fired from a cannon's mouth in the first days of October 1681, and Louis le Grand was master of the old Roman city of Argentorat, the modern Strasburg, with all its crowd of cooks and wine-tasters (those fat Alsatian citizens were the greatest eaters and drinkers in all Christendom), its beautiful cathedral, its wonderful clock, and its not less wonderful patés de foie gras. It soon became the mode in Paris for fashionable people to visit the charming old cathedral town in the smiling plains of Alsace. The fine lords and ladies of the most elegant court in Europe did not seem to mind how much bumping and jolting and fatigue they had to undergo when travelling from the capital to the Rhine borders to satisfy their curiosity by a peep at their new country cousins. That they must have been a good deal amused, and sometimes not a little scandalised, by what they saw and heard at their journey's end, is a fact about which there can be but little question. In 1725 there were grand doings, and grand folks as well, at Strasburg. The French court went thither in a body to celebrate the marriage of the fifteenth Louis with the Polish Maria Leczinska. Monsieur le Cardinal Prince de Rohan, the proudest, most disdainful, most polished of prelates, was keeping royal state at his palace of Saverne as Bishop of Strasburg-to the admiration of the world and the wonder of those who bethought themselves of his ancestor, the king's scullion. The Comte Dufour, otherwise his Majesty King Frederick the Second of Prussia, was staying incognito at the famous hostelry of "The Crow," whence he was only to be dislodged and driven away in a huff by the fact of his disguise being penetrated by some obsequious burgher, with more servility than brains. With so many swells coming and going, with such a swarm of valets and |