amuse himself by watching the dresses and manners of the motley crowd. In fact, the town itself is a museum; the inhabitants are the sight of Tiflis, quite sufficient to keep curiosity alive for days and weeks together.

Besides a multitude of caravanserais and duchans (= small inns or taverns) frequented by the natives, there are three hotels, two of them at least, and I fancy the third also (which had only lately been set up), kept by Frenchmen, and situated in the fashionable new town near the market and the so-called Sololaki or new residential quarter. One of the two older hotels has an established reputation for good cooking and extortion; so we chose the other, and found it clean and reasonably comfortable. The charges are high, as usually in the East, but lower than those of St. Petersburg or Constantinople. Of the inner social life of the city, I cannot say much, for the good reason that I did not see it. All that any stranger could see would be that of the Russians and Germans, which is much like their life anywhere else; and at balls, dinner parties, and operas, one sees, after all, the merest outside of life. Moreover, September is not the season for society. The magnates were mostly away in the country, and to our vexation we found but few even of those men of letters and science to whom we had brought introductions. Time, however, did not hang heavily on hand We had various preparations to attend to for our journey into Armenia, preparations which involved constant driving hither and thither through the town, to see people and make purchases. Everybody drives

in Tiflis, down to the very beggars: a Georgian would think himself demeaned by walking more than a few yards while there were vehicles to be had. We had to hunt up an interpreter or courier, an enterprise which proved unexpectedly difficult in this city, which is polyglott, but unorganized, so that, though there may be twenty competent interpreters to be had, it is a mere chance if you hear of any of them. Above all, we had to obtain the requisite official permissions for our journey, letters of commendation and road passports, entitling us to call for horses at the post stations. Without these documents you cannot go a step off the great roads in the Russian dominions, and very awkwardly even along them; nor is the ordinary road passport (what is called a podorojna) enough—you must, in order to get on fast, have a crown podorojna, which gives special advantages. Fortunately, Russian officials are usually civil and friendly, very official, no doubt, yet less of martinets than Frenchmen or Prussians. Moreover, we had taken the precaution of bringing introductions from high authorities at St. Petersburg, so that every facility was at once offered to us, and, what is more, actually rendered.

When all this had been despatched, there remained the purchases to be made of articles to take back to England. Now purchasing is in the East a very dif ferent and much more serious matter than any one who has not been there can imagine. It is not merely that one must never give anything like the price demanded for an article: that goes without saying. But the process of bargaining must be conducted in a

leisurely and dignified way, must be interrupted by coffee—or rather (in these countries) tea—and conversation, and, indeed, ought never to be concluded at the first sitting or two, but adjourned from time to time for further consideration. Our stay was not long enough to permit all this to be done in due and solemn form; so probably we paid more for the carpets, belts, daggers, and silks which we bought than we ought to have done. But, on the other hand, we had, at least with most of the dealers, the great advantage of being unable to speak their tongue. All the eloquent protestations of the seller came to us only through the reducing medium of a German friend who had kindly undertaken to interpret ; whereas our curt and dogged refusals to give more than a certain sum produced their full effect upon him. Thus business went on apace, and down in the cool, dark bazaar we spent only three hours in buying as many carpets; carpets which were fortunate enough to be approved of by connoisseurs among our friends in England.

It was too hot for walks or drives in the outskirts of the city, even had there been anything to see; which there is not, for, once beyond the houses, you are in an utterly bare and dreary land, especially dreary at this season, when the crops have been lifted from the brown soil. There is but one walk which is really worth taking; a short walk which, as a guidebook would say, no traveller ought to omit. The lofty ridge of hills which rises behind Tiflis on the southwest sends down a steep spur to the river, in the form of a long, narrow, rocky ridge, called the Sololaki hill,

whose north side is turned to the town, while its back slopes down to the valley of a small stream called the Tsavkissi. Its bed is dry in summer, what little water there is being drawn off for the botanic garden and the supply of the town. One of the highest and best isolated tops of this ridge is crowned by the ruins of the Persian fortress which dominated the city; broken round and square towers connected by a line of walls, that stand picturesquely up against the sky. On another point are the remains of what local antiquaries pronounce to be a Persian shrine, a temple to the Sun or to Fire, dating from the times of the Sassanid kings, before the crescent of Islam was heard of. One climbs to the top of this ridge through the shady walks of the botanic garden, which lies on the declivity of it away from the town, looking across the dry and desolate glen of the Tsavkissi, on the farther side of which a multitude of tombstones stuck in the ground, unfenced and uncared for, shews where the Persians of Tiflis bury their dead. An ascent which grows steeper when one has left the trees of the garden ends suddenly at a sort of portal in the rocky ridge, and through this one sees all Tiflis lying at one's feet, the Oriental crowd on the bridge, the Russian sentries at the Grand Duke's palace in the Golovinski boulevard, the orchard-embowered houses of the Swabian colony beyond the river, the rush of whose waters one seems to hear amid the mixed hum and stir that rises from the busy streets. Behind are the wooded hills through which the Dariel road descends from the valley of the Aragva, and, still farther, ridge

beyond ridge rising towards the central line of the Caucasus, where the snows of Kazbek glitter over all.

The mass of hills from which this Sololaki height is an offset rises farther to the west into a sort of upland plateau, where lies the pleasant little summer retreat of Kajori, the nearest to Tiflis of all those hill-stations to which its people retire during the heats. We went there it was the only excursion we had time to make -to present ourselves to the general who was then acting as military adjutant to the Grand Duke Michael (the Lieutenant of the Caucasus), and who was therefore practically commander-in-chief and war minister for the Caucasian provinces.1 It was a drive of some eight or nine miles; so, in order that we might travel with proper dignity, our hostess procured for us a phaeton, which is the name in Tiflis for a two-horse vehicle, those with one horse being merely droshkies. I may say, in passing, that the Tiflis droshkies are much better than those of St. Petersburg or Moscow, and that there exists a regular tariff of charges, a blessing which the stranger who has spent many precious minutes in bargaining by finger-signs with a St. Petersburg driver over the fare is heartily thankful for. The road winds in a succession of curves up the hills south of the city, and then turns to the west along a gently rising table-land, broken here and there by valleys in which dwarf oaks shelter themselves, but mainly covered by large corn-fields, where teams of

1 This distinguished officer, one of the ablest and most respected men in the Russian service, is, I believe, now commanding one of the divisions of the Russian army in Bulgaria.