the little steamer that lay in the river to cross the shallow bar, so that we were prisoners here till the sea fell, and perhaps for a fortnight. For the steamers which run from Poti to Constantinople and Odessa leave only once a week, and, as they can neither enter the so-called harbour of Poti nor wait outside in the open sea, are forced to lie, the one at Batum, thirty miles to the south, the other at Sukhum Kaleh, twice as far to the north, whither passengers are conveyed by tenders drawing only four feet of water. Each steamer gives thirty-six hours of grace, and, if the tender does not appear by that time, sails on her watery way, leaving the luckless passengers to sicken of fever at Poti before the next one comes. This was cheering. But there was no mistake about the facts. We walked to a point on the artificially raised bank of the river, the only elevated spot in Poti, which is so flat that you literally cannot see where you are, and watched the lordly breakers foaming on the beach half a mile off. We saw the tender lying in the stream, without even a fire in her furnace, and were told by the captain that he could not think of trying the bar. We asked every Frenchor German-speaking creature we could find whether there was anything that could be done, and were told that nothing could be done except to wait, and that at this time of year, when the weather once broke, it usually continued to blow and rain for days, possibly weeks, together, so that it was likely enough that we might not get out to even the next following steamer, which was due a week from now. We watched

the wind swaying the tops of the melancholy poplars, and vainly tried to persuade ourselves that it was going down. We enquired whether a smack could not be hired to carry us to Batum or Trebizond, but it was agreed that no smack would venture out. Besides, there were none. We thought of getting horses to ride along the coast to Batum-that very coast where the Russian troops have lately been checked in several bloody fights by the Turks-but it turned out that there was no road across the frontier, only hills and pathless swamps. So at last we settled down to the conclusion that, if the bar continued impracticable to-morrow, there was nothing for it but to retrace our steps to Tiflis, and go home over the Dariel Pass, and by railway from Vladikavkaz to Odessa, a circuit of about eleven hundred miles. This seemed too absurd to be true; but those to whom we turned for advice agreed that it was the only alternative. Having at last, then, reached a conclusion, and seeing that there was nothing for British energy to do, we thought of Mark Tapley in the swamps of Eden, which must have been rather like Poti, only pleasanter, and set ourselves to see the sights of the place.

Sights, however, there were none. There is a wretched sort of market, consisting of some booths set down in an ocean of mud, where ill-flavoured grapes and rotting plums are exposed for sale among crockery and hardware even coarser than one generally finds in Russia. Some languid Mingrelians were lounging about, but nobody seemed to have anything to do; nothing, except a little fruit, was bought or

sold.

Every street, if these roads with wooden shanties placed here and there along them could be called streets, was as wretched as the last, and when the squalls of rain drove us into the inn again, even its bare walls and empty rooms seemed better than the melancholy folk who are so thoroughly in harmony with their dwelling-place.

The river, white with the mud of Caucasian glaciers, is as wide as the Thames at Kingston, with, of course, far more water, but very sluggish for the last forty or fifty miles of its course through the flats. It used to fall into the sea south of the site of the present town, at a place where there is still a big lagoon called Palaeostom (old mouth), whose borders are said to be, if possible, more pestilential than the town itself. An ingenious friend of mine who has been at Poti insists that the Dragon1 in the Argonautic tale symbolizes the poisonous marshes of the neighbourhood, and that Jason was really a skilful Greek engineer who drained them, and whom King Aeëtes, like many Oriental princes since his day, refused to pay for the work, so that he was obliged to pay himself and decamp with his navvies. If this be so, I can only say that things are ripe for another Jason.

The houses are one-storied and nearly all of wood. Ponds have established themselves in permanence along the sides of the streets and roads, soaking through from the river, which is above their level; in

1 It certainly is true that this very common legend of the dragon who infests the neighbourhood of a city, and is killed by a young hero, is generally found in places where there are swamps which formerly bred disease.

fact, the town stands in water and out of water; marshes around it for many miles each way, and west winds bestowing upon it 62 inches of rain in the year. It is the paradise of frogs, whose croak is heard all day and all night; and wild boars find themselves at home in the swamps, where they are rarely disturbed. In such an atmosphere, everything falls to pieces; so it is perhaps not so wonderful that in this town, which has been a town ever since the time when Medea eloped from it with Jason, where the Greeks trafficked with the Colchian kings, and the Romans had a fortress (called Phasis, whence the name Poti), and the Genoese a factory, there should be now only one relic of antiquity, the ruined gate of a Turkish fort captured and dismantled by the Russians in 1829. Up till that time, though the Czar had been established in Imeritia since 1810, the Mingrelian coast had been retained by Turkey, who, however, made no use of it except for the purposes of the brisk slave trade she kept up with the Abhasians and the Tcherkesses.

We returned more dejected than ever from our ramble along the melancholy banks of the Phasis. Some little comfort, however, was at hand. All the great moralists are agreed in holding that the highest pleasure is to be found in doing good to others. Weil, a thrill of this pleasure was ours when, on going to the house of the British vice-consul, we found there a young Englishman, left alone to represent a com

1 An Imeritian king ceded his realm to Russia in 1804; subsequently one of his family rebelled; the revolt was suppressed and the country finally occupied in 1810.

mercial house and protect British interests, to whom the sight of two fellow-countrymen was evidently as great a joy as his exhausted frame could support. He had had the fever so often as to have lost count of the times, and was reduced by the general dismalness and monotony of Poti to that state of reckless indifference which the articles of the Church of England call wretchlessness. Nothing to do, for trade was languid, nowhere to go to, not a soul to speak to, except a Russian police officer. If our detention in Poti had the effect of brightening one day in this melancholy life, then, we felt, we had come to Poti not wholly in vain. He was a pleasant, hospitable fellow, and we spent the rest of the afternoon with him, listening to his accounts of the Mingrelians and Russians, and the difficulty of doing business in a country where you could not trust any one's word, nor get a stroke of work done when your back was turned. On his floor we found a whole sheaf of lately arrived English newspapers, among them the reports of the September indignation meetings, which were then at their height, and of which, of course, we had not heard a word before. The last Times contained Mr. Gladstone's speech to a mass meeting at Greenwich; what a vivid impression of the life and movement of the West it gave after the unspeakable stagnancy of these countries.

Business is never very brisk at Poti, our young friend told us, because the Russian tariff strangles import trade, while as for exports-they are chiefly ornamental woods, some dye stuffs, and a little silk and grain-the uncertainty whether a contract to