The Scourge of Typhus—PyÆmia and Pneumonia—Terrible Cold—Outposts frozen to Death—Fall of Kars—The March of the Wounded—One Hundred and Eighty Miles over the Snow—Ghastly Effects of Frostbite—The Skeleton Hands—Overcrowding in the Hospitals—Dr. Fetherstonhaugh falls Ill—A Strange Delusion—"After Long Years"—Edmund O'Donovan—A Circassian Dinner Party—Sucking-pig À l'Irlandaise—A Novel Target—Departure of Mr. Zohrab—We move into the Consulate—Exodus to Erzinghan—An Awful Sacrifice—Christmas in a Besieged Town—A Remarkable Plum Pudding—Illness of Pinkerton—Funerals in Erzeroum—Casting out the Dead—"The Lean Dogs beneath the Wall"—An Army Surgeon's Death—I fall Sick with Typhus—Heroic Devotion of James Denniston—Some of my Nurses—How I recovered—A Scientific Experiment—The Brain of a Comatose Person—Vachin's Discomfiture.

As we went round the hospital wards, now that fever had made its appearance, needless to say that we examined each patient anxiously, and every day we found three or four more cases of typhus among the wounded men. These we weeded out, and placed in a room specially prepared to receive them, for on account of the severity of their wounds we could not send them away to the central hospital.

Early in December the weather got very bad. There was a heavy fall of snow, and the hospitals were filled with sick, until altogether there were about four thousand sick and wounded in the town. Captain Morisot and Mr. Harvey were most valuable assistants; but in the first week of December Mr. Harvey, who was wanted at Constantinople, had to leave, much to our regret. Williams, our dragoman, who had been delayed on the road by the bad weather, came up with the stores, and took his place, turning out a very useful assistant.

PyÆmia began to make great ravages, and the intense cold increased the sufferings of the wounded. I amputated a man's arm at the shoulder joint, and hoped to pull him through; but the weather beat me, for he took pleurisy, and went off in a day.

Pinkerton, Woods, and myself lived in the great, bare Armenian house with Fetherstonhaugh and Denniston. Every morning we went off to our respective hospitals, returned home to lunch, and then went back in the afternoon to work again. Wood for fuel cost us twopence per pound, and rations were poor and scarce; but we pegged away doggedly, and Mr. Zohrab was very good to us. He had a splendid house amply provisioned for the winter, and he was most hospitable in his invitations to dinner; while his wife, who was a charming Englishwoman, was always cheering us up, and his two sons often gave us a hand at the hospital.

An ominous silence was maintained by our Russian besiegers, and we found that they had withdrawn the greater number of the troops from Erzeroum in order to carry out the assault on Kars. Typhus, pyÆmia, pneumonia, and the bitter, deadening cold were working for the Russians, and slew as many of the defenders of Erzeroum daily as would have fallen under the heaviest shell fire. Woods became ill; and as there was evidently heavy work before us, I sent him down to Constantinople, thus reducing the strength of our little medical garrison by one.

Snow began to fall heavily, and soon the streets were covered to a depth of several feet. At night the thermometer dropped to forty degrees below freezing-point, and the soldiers in the open suffered severely. Every morning five or six men were found frozen to death on outpost duty, lying in the snow with their eyes closed and their rifles clasped in their arms.

Meanwhile General Melikoff was making preparations for his great attack on Kars, and at last the long expected assault was delivered, and the Russians with their strange, untranslatable cry of "Nichivo," which is the ultimate expression of a reckless bravery that refuses to count any cost, swept in upon the Turkish batteries, and took the town.

Melikoff could not accommodate his numerous wounded prisoners with quarters, so he conceived the brilliant idea of sending them on to us; and, presenting each man who could walk with a blanket and a few piastres, he despatched the men on their journey from Kars to Erzeroum. What a march was that! The snow lay thickly on the frozen ground, and for league after league the legion of the wounded dragged themselves along, staining the snow with their blood as they "blazed" their pathway from Kars to Erzeroum. Hundreds dropped dead on that terrible march, and Mukhtar Pasha told me that out of two thousand men who left Kars only three hundred and seventeen reached Erzeroum. About fifty of the survivors came to our hospital, and one of them told me that he left with a party of thirty, only ten of whom came through alive, and of these ten no fewer than seven lost all their toes from frostbite.

Some typical cases of frostbite were grotesque in their ghastliness. Fancy the experience of two men who came to us for treatment after dragging their wounded bodies over the hundred and eighty miles of snow that separated Kars from Erzeroum. Their hands had been frost-bitten early in the march, and for the last week nothing was left but the skeleton of each hand from the wrist to the finger-tips. Every particle of flesh had rotted off, and the bones were black with decomposition. They came to me holding out their blackened skeleton hands feebly and pitifully before them, and I lopped off the maimed remnants at the wrists. Both these men died from the effects of that terrible march, which not even the lurid imagination of a Dante could easily rival.

We in our turn had to send out some of our lightly wounded men to relieve the congested hospitals and to diminish the chances of an epidemic. On Christmas Day we sent away sixty-six, most of whom were wounded in the hands or arms, and they started to march to Baiburt. We were able to give them warm jerseys, under-clothing, long stockings, and woollen comforters, thanks to the generosity of Lord Blantyre; and three days later we sent out another thirty, each of whom got ten piastres from Lord Blantyre's fund in addition to the clothes. All of the men reached Baiburt safely.

The hospitals were soon so crowded that typhus and typhoid fever raged with added violence, and hospital gangrene, that I had seen before in Plevna, once more made its dreaded appearance. We had eight cases in our hospital, and lost three of them. PyÆmia and frostbite were the other chief causes of mortality.

Pinkerton and I, with Morisot and Williams to help us, managed our three hundred beds fairly well; but it was a great blow to us when Williams took the fever, and was added to the sick list. When Pinkerton and myself met Fetherstonhaugh and Denniston in the evenings at dinner, we used to look at each other curiously, wondering which would be the first. It was Fetherstonhaugh. He was attacked by a kind of remittent fever, but tried to shake it off and went about his work as usual. One night, when the rest of us were at dinner, Fetherstonhaugh came into the dining-room, and remarked that there were three men with their throats cut in his room. We rushed in, but found nothing, and came to the conclusion that it was time Fetherstonhaugh left off work, so we sent him down to Trebizond.

That was the last that I saw of him for a long, long time; but the curious agency that for want of a better name we call coincidence brought us together again after many years in a strange way. It happened in Melbourne, when I had settled down to steady work at my practice, and had almost forgotten the stirring days in Asia Minor, except for a few rare glimpses when memory lifted the veil. I was engaged one day at the Supreme Court as a professional witness in some case; and when I stepped out of the box, it occurred to me that I knew the face of a man who was sitting below me in the body of the court.

"Hullo, Ryan, how are you?" he said.

I looked again, and recognized Denniston, who told me that he had come out from England on a trip, and had just strolled into the court out of idle curiosity. As he was talking to me, I looked through the door leading into the passage, and saw another face that I recognized.

"I wonder what has become of Charlie Fetherstonhaugh?" said Denniston.

"Look behind you. There he is," I replied, as Charlie Fetherstonhaugh himself came up, sound and hearty, having left the three men with their throats cut behind him in the hospital at Erzeroum. He too had dropped from the clouds, and strolled into the court by mere chance. So we had dinner together that evening, and great was the jollification thereat.

At our Stafford House Hospital in Erzeroum we had a continual stream of fresh cases, for the cavalry were continually making dashes against the Russians, and small affairs between outposts came off nearly every day; so that as fast as one lot of patients died or were discharged cured, a second lot were brought in. Cases of frostbite became very numerous, and many a time I had to lop off a man's feet or hands the flesh of which was simply rotting on the bones. Rations too were getting scarce, and as there was not enough food for every one the prisoners in the gaol were the first to suffer. The interior of that Erzeroum gaol was a sight not soon to be forgotten. Crowded together in a state of indescribable filth, the prisoners fought with the ferocity of wild beasts for the few handfuls of raw grain that the guard threw to them occasionally. Still, we continued to get beef tea and mutton broth for our wounded, and I made a point of going round the wards and administering it myself to those who needed it.

It was in connection with a matter of rations that I remember Edmund O'Donovan especially. O'Donovan was one of the wildest, most brilliant, and original geniuses who ever left Ireland to follow up the avocation of a war correspondent. He came to dinner with us one night, and his wit and versatility made a great impression upon me. The next time that I saw him was in response to an urgent request that I should call upon him and get him out of a scrape. His adventure was so thoroughly characteristic that I may be excused for narrating it.

O'Donovan, it seemed, with the warm-hearted generosity of his race, had invited half a dozen Circassian officers to dine with him, and had prepared an appetizing banquet for them. Among the dishes was an entrÉe so savoury, so succulent, so entirely satisfying to the palate of an epicure, that the Circassians, like the simple children of nature that they were, sent back their plates again and again for more. There was something new and strange yet delightful withal about that entrÉe. The meat was white and delicate and tender, the gravy was of a luscious brown, and in a fit of absence of mind the Circassian officers loaded up the whole cargo, while they laughed politely at O'Donovan's best Dublin stories, which were chiefly remarkable for having points where one never expected them.

Then O'Donovan expressed a hope that they had enjoyed the dinner, and the Circassians were most effusive in their thanks. Really they had never eaten anything like that entrÉe before, and would their host mind telling them the recipe?

"Begorra, I can tell ye that aisy enough," spluttered O'Donovan, with a mighty laugh. "Ye've been atin' the natest slip of a pig I've ever seen out of Connaught, and beautifully cooked he was too." Then he explained to them in Turkish more clearly, and these good Mussulmen burst into eruption. What a shindy there was at that dinner-table! The Circassians could not have been quicker if they had been at Donnybrook Fair, and they rushed at their host with the first weapons that came handy. O'Donovan did very well with the bottles for a minute or two, and afterwards with the leg of a chair; but they were too many for him, and when the table was upset and the lamps put out there was a fairly lively five minutes round the wreck of the dinner-table and of the empty dish that had once contained a sucking-pig À l'Irlandaise. The Moslem Circassians, full to repletion with the flesh of the accursed creature, fought under a disadvantage; and when O'Donovan's servants rushed in and took their master's part, the issue was no longer in doubt. Although the revolvers were going freely, only one man was hurt, and it appeared that O'Donovan had shot him in the arm. The affair created a great deal of excitement at the time, and the Circassians vowed vengeance for the insult; but we managed to pacify them eventually, and there were so many other things requiring attention that the trouble soon blew over.

This was not the only occasion that O'Donovan got into a scrape, for not long afterwards, while promenading on the roof of his house, the idea occurred to him that a little revolver practice might improve his aim. Drawing his six-shooter, he proceeded to blaze away at a dog that was gnawing a bone in the middle of the street; but like another famous character in fiction, he "missed the blue-bottle and floored the Mogul." In other words, a bullet which went wide of the dog found its billet in a fleshy part of the body of a very stout Turkish woman, who on receiving this flank attack fled in great disorder screaming loudly.

O'Donovan sent for me to help him out of this difficulty too, and we had to give the woman £10 to square her. The erratic marksman was then the war correspondent of the Daily News; but I never saw an account of this incident in his graphic descriptive sketches. He left Erzeroum in December, and afterwards, when the army of Hicks Pasha was cut to pieces in Egypt, O'Donovan met a soldier's death.

At this time we lost the services of Mr. Zohrab, the consul; for after the fall of Kars, Lord Derby, desiring to avoid any complications in the event of the Russians occupying Erzeroum, instructed the British consul to retire at once to Constantinople. Mr. Zohrab and his wife and sons accordingly left the town, much to our regret, for they had been very helpful to us. When he went, however, he handed over to us his house, which was fully provisioned, amply supplied with fuel, and provided with a well stocked cellar. We took possession at once, and after the poor kind of way in which we had been living our new quarters were most luxurious.

Although we personally were much better off than before, yet the condition of the bulk of the people in the town was getting steadily worse every day. Stores of every kind were getting scarce, and Kurd Ismael Pasha, who replaced Mukhtar Pasha as commander-in-chief when that officer was ordered to Constantinople, had a difficult task in administration. Towards the end of December it became necessary to relieve the town of a portion of the population, and an expedition consisting of four hundred men and two hundred women and children was ordered to start for Erzinghan, a town which was supposed to be five days' journey distant from Erzeroum.

This march rivalled in its horrors the march of the wounded men from Kars; for before the expedition had gone a day's journey from Erzeroum a fearful snowstorm swept down upon the hapless creatures, and when the miserable remnant had dragged themselves back to their starting-point it was found that of the two hundred women and children not a single soul remained. All died where they fell, including the wife of the colonel commanding the expedition, and were buried under the drifting heaps of snow that the wind piled high over the uncoffined remains. Of the soldiers who got back to Erzeroum the greater number perished from frostbite, dysentery, and exposure. It was an awful holocaust.

In spite of fever and dysentery, gunshot wounds in horrible variety and septic disease in every hospital, so strangely is the Anglo-Saxon mind constituted that we decided to "enjoy ourselves" at Christmas, although the Russians were practically knocking at our gates. My previous Christmas dinner consisted of a handful of maize cobs eaten in solitude on the ice-bound road to Orkhanieh. During the intervening year I had lived and worked and suffered much—and almost to my own astonishment I was still alive. So here at Erzeroum I proposed to have a Christmas festivity, and Pinkerton, Denniston, and Woods eagerly accepted the suggestion. We decided to invite all the European doctors in the town, and to give them a real English Christmas dinner, for which great preparations had to be made.

When we took over Mr. Zohrab's house, we also assumed a right title and interest in the services of two sturdy henchmen. One was old Tom Rennison, who had been dragoman for General Williams during the siege of Erzeroum thirty years before, and the other was an Armenian named Vachin. Tom Rennison, veteran campaigner as he was, had never seen mince-pies made, so to speak, under fire; and Vachin knew more about the preparation of pilaf than plum pudding. Consequently not only the arrangement of the menu, but the actual work of cooking it, devolved upon the medical staff; and I am sorry to say that, though by this time there were few things in surgery which we would not attempt, from disarticulation of a thumb to amputation of a thigh, nevertheless in the science of cooking we were painfully unlearned. Lister was an open book to us; but the dark sayings of Brillat-Savarin were as obscure as the Rig-Vedas.

Pinkerton, Woods, and myself held a consultation over the plum pudding, which was intended to beget envy and jealousy in the hearts of the Austrian and Hungarian doctors, and to be a dazzling example of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon cooking over the unsubstantial kickshaws of continental cuisines. I noticed that Vachin, who was always an ill disposed fellow, looked undisguisedly contemptuous of our preparations, and that old Tom Rennison was obviously fluctuating between the extremes of hope and fear. It is not easy to recollect exactly what was in that pudding. Denniston had heard that suet was an ingredient of supreme importance, so the yellow fat was cut from the joint of beef which had been moving about the yard only two days before as the sirloin of Mr. Zohrab's best heifer. We found plenty of currants and raisins among the stores; but there was no candied peel, and the spices which had been imported from Teheran somehow smelt quite unlike the unconvincing substance that we remembered to have seen in our youth at the suburban grocer's. We had plenty of flour of course, and we mixed our chef-d'oeuvre in a big brown pot. It was a viscous, oedematous mass, of the consistency of soft indiarubber, when we had done mixing it, and it resembled nothing so much as a bucketful of Zante currants which had fallen by accident into a glue-pot. The other fellows made some very discouraging remarks; but I tied up the ghastly mixture in half a clean sheet, and sat up all night on Christmas Eve boiling it in the iron pot.

On Christmas night we had a grand banquet, and about twenty other European doctors came in answer to our invitations to receive our hospitality. We explained to them at some length that we were going to give them a real English dinner, which was a treat that they had probably never enjoyed before, and very likely might never enjoy again.

Certainly the beef was a little tough, as the hapless heifer had only been sacrificed on the previous day, and then there was no horse-radish and very little gravy; but the geese were first-rate. Like everything else in Asia Minor, they were evidently of great antiquity. Probably they had seen the former siege of Erzeroum; but age, which weakens most other things, had strengthened their limbs and steeled their muscles, until to disintegrate the closely knitted tissues was a veritable feat of strength, and one swallowed a mouthful with the comfortable glow of satisfaction that follows the surmounting of a desperate difficulty. Of the mince-pies I cannot speak with certainty, for Woods had taken complete control over the manufacture of these delicious delicacies, and, much as I respected my colleague, I was suspicious of his ingredients. I can testify, however, from the simple experience of lifting one up from the dish that the mince-pies were solid and weighty additions to the menu. I waited with some anxiety for the pudding, and the happiness that the artist feels in a work completed came over me as I saw old Tom Rennison bearing in the dish containing the pudding, surrounded by leaping tongues of blue flame from the burning brandy. Up to this period the Hungarian doctors had been politely complimentary, and had accepted slabs of heifer's flesh as hard as boot leather and chunks of goose that would have made excellent ammunition for siege artillery as typical dishes of a correct English dinner. By dint of washing the food down with plenty of wine and many tumblers of brandy-and-water, they struggled along gamely through the first courses; but when they received their portions of the plum pudding they distinctly jibbed. With the flames playing round its charred, excoriated surface, it certainly had a diabolical look, and it held together with a glutinous consistency that for an appreciable number of seconds defied the attack even of a carving-knife. The Hungarian doctors viewed their plates with an alarmed suspicion that was too genuine to be concealed, and I must confess that when I got a spoonful of my masterpiece into my mouth the taste did not compensate in the least for the difficulty of detaching the fragment from the surrounding bed-rock. That was the first and last time that I cooked a plum pudding.

In spite of these little drawbacks, however, we all thoroughly enjoyed our Christmas dinner, and we made a fair hole in Mr. Zohrab's cellar, which was well stocked with wines and spirits and also with beer and porter. The dawn was coming up over the snow on the distant hills when we separated, laughing, singing, and wishing each other a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Within a fortnight nearly every one of us was down with typhus, and within a month more than half of our number were dead.

The first of the English doctors to catch the fever was poor Pinkerton. He was always terribly frightened of it, and used to carry quantities of camphor about in his pockets as a disinfectant; but with the epidemic raging as it was, any attempt at personal disinfection for a medical man attending the cases was practically hopeless. Pinkerton was always talking about his dread of getting typhus, and saying that if he caught it he would never get over it. This made Denniston and myself very anxious about him; for though he was a splendidly built, handsome fellow, with an excellent constitution, his apprehensions laid him open to attack more readily, and would certainly decrease his chance of recovery if the fever got its clutch upon him. Wrought up to a state of high nervous tension by continually moving among the sick and the dying, it was not to be wondered at that we attached significance to the veriest trifles, and both Denniston and myself recollected with dismay that every one of our patients who had had a presentiment of death up to that time had died.

On the last day of the old year Pinkerton became ill, and we put him to bed. He was very despondent, and I could see at once that he had an attack of the most malignant typhus. He was a very bad patient, and would take neither his medicine nor his nourishment without a great deal of trouble. Our number was now reduced to two, and Denniston and myself looked at each other every morning with questioning gaze. Fortunately Denniston had had malignant typhus in his student days at Glasgow, and was not likely to take it again, while I felt that if I could only pull through we might still be able to keep on the two hospitals. After three or four days Pinkerton fell into a semi-comatose condition, from which he never emerged, but lay in bed moaning feebly, and talking incoherently at intervals of fighting and of operations and of places and people whose names were unfamiliar to me.

How clearly those dreadful days come back! We had the ever present, bitter, numbing cold, and the ceaseless work in the hospital as one passed from bed to bed, from the moaning wounded to the poor wretches who were being consumed by the fires of fever, and thence to the ghastly mutilated creatures who had lost hands, feet, ears, and even noses by frostbite. Then there was in addition the anxiety about Pinkerton, and the fear that one or both of us two survivors would succumb to the strain, and thus leave the bulk of the sick and wounded without medical succour. In addition to it all was the nervous strain of waiting for the expected Russian attack, which would have been gladly welcomed as a relief from the intolerable tension.

During these early days of January, 1878, the mortality in Erzeroum was something appalling. Out of a total number of about seventeen thousand troops in the town, there were on one day no fewer than three hundred and two deaths, and the daily death-rate frequently rose to two hundred! The weak, emaciated survivors had hardly strength left to dig graves for their dead comrades in the hard and frozen ground. At last they gave up even the pretence of digging, and the bodies were simply carted out about a mile from the main thoroughfares of the town, and left in the snow just inside the city walls.

Of course all conveyances were placed on runners while the snow was on the ground, and the little sleighs which served as dead-carts passed our house every morning at about ten o'clock with their mournful loads collected from the various hospitals. The bodies of the dead soldiers were stripped of their clothing and wrapped in clean white sheets according to the Moslem custom. Each little sleigh contained ten or twelve bodies, and as I looked out in the morning I could see the burial parties going out on duty. The white-sheeted corpses were packed closely together; and as the sleighs had no tailboards and were very small, the naked feet of the corpses projected out at the back in a horribly grotesque fashion. As the little vehicles, which were dragged by the fatigue squads, glided in ghostly silence over the frozen snow a long howl in the distance broke the stillness. This was taken up by another, and another, and another, until the voices of fully fifteen hundred famished dogs came through the crisp, clear wintry air with terrible significance, chilling the marrow of the listener as he watched the long procession of helpless, white-sheeted corpses moving slowly over the white-sheeted ground. A Parsee's obsequies, when the filthy vultures flap their wings and gather to the feast, must be an eerie sight; a Gussein's funeral in the Ganges, where the great flat-nosed alligators swarm expectantly, must stir even the sluggish imagination of the impassive Hindoo. But surely no man ever had more dreadful burial rites than were celebrated daily over hundreds of the dead inside the walls of Erzeroum, where the famished dogs disputed the possession of the poor mutilated remnants with sickening ferocity, and where the only prayers over the bodies of the dead were the muttered growls of the worrying pack. There is a short passage in "The Siege of Corinth" which exactly describes the grisly scene. Lord Byron wrote of Alp the renegade as he paced under the walls of Corinth these lines:

In this passage the poet has described with more detail than one cares to give in a plain narrative the scene which was enacted every morning in the early part of that month of January within the walls of Erzeroum.

It was about January 8 that I took the fever, which was by this time ravaging both the civil and military population. At first I tried to shake it off, and continued to walk about with aching head and quaking limbs in the hope that it might not have got a fair hold of me. On the second day I became quite stupid, though I still refused to go to bed, and on the evening of that day Pinkerton died.

Next morning we buried him. Wood was so difficult to get, that we were put to great straits to make a coffin for him; but at last we contrived one out of an old packing-case. Pinkerton was a very tall man, and the flimsy coffin was hardly big enough for the body. There was scarcely enough wood to make the lid fit properly. When we were making the preparations for the burial, I was myself nearly delirious with typhus, and almost the last thing that I can remember before going off altogether was the sight of the miserable coffin with a gaping crevice in the top, through which the end of poor Pinkerton's silky fair beard was protruding. Denniston notified Hakki Bey, the civil governor, of our loss; and an escort of soldiers came down and buried our comrade by the side of Dr. Guppy, who had died on duty in the same place before we arrived there. The burial service was read by the Rev. Mr. Cole, an American missionary, who was in Erzeroum, accompanied by his wife and family and by a young American lady, also engaged in missionary work among the Armenians. Then the soldiers fired a volley over the grave, and the career of the fine young army surgeon was closed.

When I was put to bed, the whole strength of the medical and assisting staff of the two English hospitals, Lord Blantyre's Hospital and that of the Stafford House Committee, was reduced to one man, namely, Dr. Denniston. Guppy and Pinkerton were dead, and Williams, Morisot, and myself were down with typhus. Under these circumstances, Denniston was left with the two hospitals full of patients to look after as well as us three at home, and he rose to the occasion most heroically.

Of course at that time I was unconscious of everything, but I found out afterwards what happened. Denniston handed the English hospital back to the Turkish administration which had managed it before our arrival, and he secured an assistant from the French consul to help him with the other one and with us. He told me afterwards that I made a very good patient, but I doubt it. I can just remember him coming in to see me one day and giving me a pill, which, though I was almost delirious, I made a great pretence of swallowing, but really kept it under my tongue and spat it out as soon as he had left the room!

The American missionary, Mr. Cole, used to come and sit with me sometimes. I had known him before I was ill, and admired his character greatly. He seemed to me to be a very fine type of man and a true Christian. In Erzeroum at that time the healing of souls was attended with as much danger as the healing of bodies, and there were martyrs in both causes. Mr. Cole lost one of his children from typhus, and the bright, winning, and enthusiastic young American lady who was working as a missionary in conjunction with him and Mrs. Cole also laid down her life in the noble service in which she had engaged.

During the day, while Denniston was away at the hospital fighting a desperate single-handed battle against wounds and disease of every kind, we patients at home had many kindly visitors. Morisot and Williams got over the worst of the illness sooner than I did; but for some time we all required watching.

I am sorry to say that during my illness I grievously erred against good taste, and quite forgot the esteem and regard which I venture to believe I had always hitherto shown towards ladies. The fact of the matter was that I had seen so few ladies in the past eighteen months that the sight of them irritated and annoyed my disordered brain exceedingly. So it came about that, when two sweet-faced French nuns, who had heard from Dr. Denniston of his desperate need for nurses, called in and visited me, I viewed their presence with the profoundest suspicion and distrust. I had been working for so long among great, strong, hairy-faced Turks that my delirious imagination failed to recognize these two young nuns, with their rustling skirts and their soft white hands, as fellow creatures at all, and I expressed such terror and alarm at their appearance that the poor things were obliged to fly. In the Ingoldsby Legends there is a picture of FranÇois Xavier Auguste, the gay mousquetaire, sitting up in bed in an attitude of horror, while on chairs at each side of his pillow sit duplicate images of Sister ThÉrÈse. I must have looked very much like that when the well meaning nuns came in to sit by me, and found my language and demeanour so terrifying that they had to decamp at once, leaving me to the less exciting ministrations of a dear old Capuchin monk called Father Basilio, who was sent to take their place. He used to sit up with me in the long night watches and humour all my fancies, kindly old soul that he was; but I think he never expected that I would pull through.

Though young in years, I was a veteran as far as horrors were concerned, and I can truthfully say that I was absolutely without fear of death. Possibly it was this that saved me, for I remember telling Denniston at the worst period of my illness that he need have no fear on my account, for I had not the slightest intention of "pegging out."

I was very bad for about twelve days, and the events of that time of illness impressed themselves on my brain in the vaguest and most indistinct manner. Still, it is interesting from the scientific point of view to note that impressions can be made even upon a semi-comatose brain which are sufficiently strong to be of subsequent use. The negatives on the convolutions of the brain were not very sharply outlined; but the will, like a skilful photographer, could retouch them afterwards until they made a perfect picture. This scientific fact I was able to demonstrate myself, to the great confusion of our Armenian dragoman Vachin.

It happened this way. When I recovered from the fever, I was helping Denniston to make an inventory of poor Pinkerton's personal effects, so that we could send them to his relatives, when we made the unpleasant discovery that a sum of £20 which he had in his possession was missing. Pinkerton used to carry the money in Turkish liras in the pocket of his trousers; and as I had been shifted into his room after his death because it was larger and airier than my own, his trousers were hanging on a nail on the wall right opposite my bed. We examined the pockets, but they were empty.

Then I began to think back and to think hard. Gradually there appeared before the eye of my mind the picture of a shadowy, misty, unsubstantial figure, that wobbled grievously from side to side as it walked, and seemed to turn round and round with the room, the bed, the chair, and the window, which all swung and oscillated like the engines of the little Messageries steamer that brought us up to Trebizond. What on earth was the captain of the Messageries steamer going to do! and how the little tub was rolling, to be sure! Was it the captain, though, or some one else? I fastened all the will power of my brain, healthy once more, upon the misty shadow cast upon its disordered surface during illness. I saw the scene again, more distinctly now, and noted that the wobbling figure approached the wall exactly at the spot where the trousers hung on the nail opposite my bed. The engines seemed to be slowing down, little by little the room ceased to revolve, and at last the figure turned round towards my bed, and I saw the face. It was not the captain of the steamer, but it was Vachin, our dragoman, and he was deliberately counting out money from poor Pinkerton's trousers pocket.

All this came back to me with greater clearness the longer I thought over it; and at last I felt morally certain that Vachin was the thief, and that he had cynically taken the money before my eyes, knowing that I was delirious, and confident that I would never recover to bear witness against him.

We taxed the Armenian with the theft; and when I told him that it was no use denying it, for I had seen him take the money, he confessed his guilt. A short consultation between Denniston and myself was followed by the despatch of a note to Hakki Bey, the civil governor; and as a punishment for misdeeds in the past and an incentive to virtue in the future, Vachin was consigned to the Erzeroum general prison pending the pleasure of the governor. We got back the £20 from him before he went, and for three weeks we left him in a place, from which the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been a pleasant change, to meditate upon the instability of human happiness. We sent him some blankets and also food at intervals, besides going up occasionally to see how he was getting on and whether he was truly repentant. The condition of the unfortunate wretch, however, was so deplorable, and the interior of that prison, with its gangs of half-frozen, half-starved prisoners fighting fiercely among themselves for the scanty dole of raw grain and old rags that were thrown among them by the gaolers, was so distressing, that we relented, and procured a release for our thievish dragoman from Hakki Bey. On the night that he was discharged from prison he deserted to the Russians, and we never saw him again. And so farewell to Vachin.