Thereupon—for I did not know very well
what next to do, unless I had offered to buy his
daughter, which I was not prepared for—I
tried to apologise for the act, and intimated my
wish that he would show me the weapon that
had, among the avalanches and forests of
Daghestan, been so terrible to the tea-drinking
Russky.

He at once acceded. Putting on an air of
eager connoisseurship, I examined the dreadful
double-edged ponderous weapon. It was some
two feet long, broad as the palm of your hand,
point sharp as a rose thorn; the handle was
heavy, but without a hilt; the blade had this
specialty about it, that it was of good Damascus
steel—as I could tell by that peculiar rippled
water-mark that indicates the hard welded metal
of Syria; down the middle, grooved deep as
the thickness of a goose-quill, in the centre of
the steel, ran a channel, to drain off the blood
from the handle and surface.

I pointed to this as I returned the weapon to
the Circassian's belt, and exclaimed, with
considerable effect and much appositeness:

"Russky."

Upon which the violent chieftain brandished
the weapon dangerously near my eyes, and went
through a sort of drill of imaginary stabs and
slashes, and scalping slices at an imaginary
Prince Daniel, or Russian General Ivan
Damanoff—much to my alarm yet edification.

And this, thought I, is one of those hardy
horsemen who can live for days on wild flowers
and mountain grass; whose luxuries are dried
plums and apricots, spongy cakes, white cheese,
and flour paste; and to whom the snowy
pine-forest is as welcome as the carpeted divan, or
the gold-brocaded beds of a pasha. This is,
perhaps, a chieftain who, in his own now
enslaved country, has had his flocks and herds, his
obedient horsemen, his rich robes, his patient
servants—now, he is all but a beggar, munching my
chesnuts in the streets of a Turkish city. These
broken shoes were once yellow—beside that still
faithful dagger once, perhaps, hung gorgeous
pistol-cases. His aoul (fortified house) is now
a Russian's—his wife has (O cruel destiny!) been,
perhaps, sold to pay his travelling expenses.

Yes—start not, reader—such is the
economical but eccentric mode of conduct not
unfrequently adopted by Circassian husbands, in
these times of necessity and exile. It was only
yesterday that I strolled past the spot where you
take boat, on the Stamboul side of the wooden
bridge before mentioned, and I saw three caïques
full of Circassian wives, going off to the
Bosphorus-palaces of the Turkish pashas, who had
paid for them in ready money. It may be that
piastres and Medjids, when of good current
metal, have a tendency to allay grief, but so it
was, that the sorrow evidenced at that
melancholy and eternal parting was of a most silent
and suppressed kind. Perhaps, the tears choking
back, fell down in a cold death-dew upon the
heart; perhaps, the blow to the broken-hearted
and starving exiles, was too stunning and dumbing
for noisy tears; but so it was, that the fair
ladies, wrapped up until they became bundles,
parted from their fathers and husbands and
young brothers and friends of the family, with a
most commendable serenity. They sat down in
the boats, and, without looking back, were pulled
off to new friends and a slave's home. If
the men had been cattle-dealers, superintending
the starting of cows from Cork to Bristol, they
could not have stood more stolid and
unmoved. Those white statue-faced women, with
coarse black hair cut level across the forehead,
crowned with strange mitre-shaped helmets of
silvery tinsel, were, it seemed to me, thinking
more of the future than the past: more of the
silk dresses and savoury pilaffs of the pasha's
house, than the sour milk and verminy sheepskins
of their Daghestan home. Perhaps, perpetual
hunger and want had hardened their hearts, and
driven out love; perhaps, this was a Roman
parting, where grief was stifled and trodden
under foot, only that a Circassian might not
appear womanly before the infidel.

I have myself a contempt for that hateful
hypocrisy in literature, sham sentiment, and
therefore I may as well add that, knowing something
behind the scenes of Circassian life—for
my Russian friend, Major Sutherlandsky Edwardsky,
had not talked to me for nothing—I knew
well, pitying as I did, deeply and sincerely, the
brave nation now (shame on England!) crushed
and driven into exile, how savage were the wild
race whose representative sat munching chesnuts
before me. Had not the gallant Major told me
how brutalising was the long warfare carried on
between the Russians and the Circassians? Did
I not know that the Georgian Prince Cutemoff
used to sit in state at Tsenondahl, to receive,
with promises and thanks and grateful signs of
the cross, the Georgian militiamen, who, after a
skirmish or a foray, bring their sacks full of
Mussulmans' heads to roll out before the
highly-civilised and scented Muscovite, the dandy of
Moscow balls? Did I not know that the Murids
returned from their forays with screaming,
bleeding, sabre-cut women tied behind their
horses, with the hands of dead Russians tied to
their flag-poles, and with sacks full of Russian
saints and Parisian barbaric finery swinging
by their stirrups? I knew, too, that only
two days ago, a disturbance broke out in
the great Circassian Khan, on the top of the
hill, in which five men were stabbed—and
all about what? A pump? A legacy? A bit
of property? A Chancery suit? No; about a
child that had been slapped by a woman that
did not belong to it. Upon this arose angry tears,
hysteric laughter, scratchings, huggings, tearings.
Then supervened male interference, partisans,
nudgings, reviling, blows, stabs—till in steps
Death, and banishes five of the exiles at one
word of his for ever, not merely from Daghestan,
but from the totus orbis, the globe, the totus
teres of it. I do not want, indeed, God knows, to
show that the Circassian is a Red Indian, but I
do say he is a wild, headstrong, virtuous,
religious, untamable semi-savage. Like all
habitually armed men, he is pugnacious and