great mission of civilizing Asia should begin. That was
unsatisfactory, because Asia is not going to be civilized after the
methods of the West. There is too much Asia, and she is too old. You
cannot reform a lady of many lovers, and Asia has been insatiable in
her flirtations aforetime. She will never attend Sunday school, or
learn to vote save with swords for tickets.

Dirkovitch knew this as well as any one else, but it suited him to
talk special-correspondently and to make himself as genial as he
could. Now and then he volunteered a little, a very little,
information about his own Sotnia[8] of Cossacks, left apparently to
look after themselves somewhere at the back of beyond. He had done
rough work in Central Asia, and had seen rather more help-yourself
fighting than most men of his years. But he was careful never to
betray his superiority, and more than careful to praise on all
occasions the appearance, drill, uniform, and organization of her
Majesty's White Hussars. And, indeed, they were a regiment to be
admired. When Mrs. Durgan, widow of the late Sir John Durgan, arrived
in their station, and after a short time had been proposed to by every
single man at mess, she put the public sentiment very neatly when she
explained that they were all so nice that unless she could marry them
all, including the colonel and some majors who were already married,
she was not going to content herself with one of them. Wherefore she
wedded a little man in a rifle regiment--being by nature
contradictious--and the White Hussars were going to wear crape on
their arms, but compromised by attending the wedding in full force,
and lining the aisle with unutterable reproach. She had jilted them
all--from Basset-Holmer, the senior captain, to Little Mildred, the
last subaltern, and he could have given her four thousand a year and a
title. He was a viscount, and on his arrival the mess had said he had
better go into the Guards, because they were all sons of large grocers
and small clothiers in the Hussars, but Mildred begged very hard to be
allowed to stay, and behaved so prettily that he was forgiven, and
became a man, which is much more important than being any sort of
viscount.

The only persons who did not share the general regard for the White
Hussars were a few thousand gentlemen of Jewish extraction who lived
across the border, and answered to the name of Pathan. They had only
met the regiment officially, and for something less tha