on which the above is founded were given to the
author by the Reverend Doctor Thomson, who has resided in Turkey as the
agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society for upwards of thirty
years.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

THE BLACK CLOUDS GATHER.

While I was enjoying myself thus, among the towns and villages on the
banks of the Danube, admiring the scenery, cultivating the acquaintance
of the industrious rural population of the great river, and making an
occasional trip into the interior, the dogs of war were let loose, and
the curtain rose on the darkest tragedy of the nineteenth century.

The comic and the tragic are inextricably mingled in this world. I
believe that this is no accident, but, like everything else, a special
arrangement. "All fun makes man a fool," but "all sorrow" makes him a
desperado. The feeling of anxiety aroused by the war news was, I may
say, mitigated by the manner of its announcement.

"Sir," cried Lancey, bursting into the cabin one afternoon while I was
preparing for a trip ashore, "the Roossians 'as declared war, an' the
whole country is gettin' hup in harms!"

Of course I had been well aware for some time past that there was a
prospect, nay, a probability, of war; but I had not allowed myself to
believe it, because I have a strong natural tendency to give civilised
men credit for more sense than they appear to possess. That Russia
would really draw the sword, and sacrifice millions of treasure, and
thousands of her best young lives, to accomplish an object that could be
more easily and surely attained by diplomacy, with the expenditure of
little money and no bloodshed, seemed to me incredible. That the other
European nations should allow this state of things to come to pass,
seemed so ridiculous that I had all along shut my eyes to facts, and
proceeded on my voyage in the confidence of a peaceful solution of the
"Eastern question."

"In days of old," I said to my skipper, in our last conversation on this
subject, which we were fond of discussing, "the nations were less
educated than now, and less imbued perhaps with the principles of the
peace-teaching gospel, which many of them profess to believe; but now
the Christian world is almost out of its teens; intercommunication of
ideas and interests is almost miraculously facile. Thought is well-nigh
instantaneously flashed from hemisphere to hemisphere, if not from pole
to pole; commerce is so highly cultivated that international exh