d script of the
correspondent scribbling for life in the saddle or the cleft of a
commanding tree while the shells were whistling past. We missed him
dreadfully when he was gone--even Villiers, who liked good cooking,
owned to thinking long for his return. For, in addition to his other
virtues, Andreas was a capital cook. It is true that his courses had a
habit of arriving at long and uncertain intervals. After a dish of
pungent stew, no other viands appearing to loom in the near future,
Villiers and myself would betake ourselves to smoking, and perhaps on a
quiet day would lapse into slumber. From this we would be aroused by
Andreas to partake of a second course of roast chicken, the bird having
been alive and unconscious of its impending fate when the first course
had been served. No man is perfect, and as regarded Andreas there were
some petty spots on the sun. He had, for instance, a mania for the
purchase of irrelevant poultry, and for accommodating the fowls in our
wagon, tied by the legs, against the day of starvation, which he always,
but causelessly, apprehended. I do not suppose any reader has ever had
any experience of domestic poultry as bedfellows, and I may caution him
earnestly against making any such experiment.

I do not know whether it is a detraction from Andreas's worth to mention
that another characteristic of his was the habit of awaking us in the
still watches of the night, for the purpose of imparting his views on
recondite phases of the great Eastern question. But how trivial were
such peccadilloes in a man who was so resolute not to be beaten in
getting my despatch to the telegraph wire, that once, when three
pontoons of the bridge across the Danube were sunk, he crossed the gap
hand over hand by the hand-rope, sloshing down with the current as the
slack of the rope gave to his weight! Andreas became quite an
institution in the Russian camp. When Ignatieff, the Tsar's intimate,
the great diplomatist who has now curiously fizzled out, would honour us
by partaking sometimes of afternoon tea in our tent, he would call
Andreas by his name and call him "Molodetz"--the Russian for "brave
fellow." In the Servian campaign Dochtouroff had got him the Takova
cross, which Andreas sported with great pride, and Ignatieff used to
tell him that the Tsar was seriously thinking of conferring on him the
Cross of St. George, badinage which Andreas took as dead earnest.
MacGahan used gravely to entreat him to take