land now or speak for him in the village council? Yet of pure pity we
kept him a few weeks, that he might hear the story of the Gospel of
goodwill and forgiveness; but he would shake his head and sigh. "No,
that teaching is not for us. What I want is revenge--revenge!" Then,
because a concrete case will sometimes accomplish what a mere statement
cannot effect, I told him the story of the Conolly bed. Over each bed
is a little framed card denoting the benefactor or supporter of that
bed and the person commemorated thereby, and over this particular
bed is written:

Conolly Bed.

In Memory of Captain Conolly, beheaded at Bukhara.

As long ago as 1841 this brave English officer was sent on a
political mission to Bukhara, which was then an independent State,
and not under the rule of Russia, as now. The Muhammadan ruler,
Bahadur Khan, affected to be suspicious of his intentions, and threw
him into prison, where another English officer, Colonel Stoddart,
had already been incarcerated. It was in vain for them to protest
and to claim the consideration due to a representative of the British
Government; they were met by the answer that no letter had come from
the Queen in reply to one sent by the Amir, and that therefore they
had certainly come to stir up Khiva and Khokand to war against the
Amir of Bukhara. Their effects were confiscated; even their very
clothes were taken from them, till they only had their shirts and
drawers left, when a filthy sheepskin was given to Captain Conolly
as some protection against the winter cold of Bukhara. Their servants
were thrown into a horrible dungeon called the Black Well, into which
each man had to be lowered by a rope from the aperture at the top,
and was then left to rot in the filth below.

Captain Conolly managed to secrete a small English Prayer-Book about
his person, and this was a daily source of comfort to him and his
companion in prison, and he marked verses in the Psalms and passages in
the prayers from which they derived comfort. On the fly-leaves and the
margins he wrote a diary of their sufferings; month succeeded month,
and their hearts grew sick with hope deferred, and their bodies worn
with fever, wasting and wounds. On February 10, 1842, he writes:
"We have now been fifty-three days and nights without means of
changing or washing our linen. This book will probably not leave me,
so I now will, as opportunity serves, write in it the last blessing of
my best