led into Persia; we have
burned a number of villages, hay, and corn; and we have eaten the
sheep of the rebels, when we were hungry. When the snow had driven
the insurgents from their mountain-fastnesses, they yielded and
presented hostages. We then marched to the Fort of Bournaya, [27]
and from this station our detachment was ordered into winter
quarters. Of this division my regiment forms a part, and our
head-quarters are at Derbend.

[Footnote 27: Stormy.]

The other day, the general, who was about to depart on another
campaign on the Line, came to take leave of us, and thus there
was a larger company than usual to meet our adored commander.
Alexei Petrovitch came from his tent, to join us at tea. Who
is not acquainted with his face, from the portraits? But they
cannot be said to know Yermoloff at all, who judge of him only by
a lifeless image. Never was there a face gifted with such nobility
of expression as his! Gazing on those features, chiselled in the
noble outline of the antique, you are involuntarily carried back to
the times of Roman grandeur. The poet was in the right, when he said
of him:--

"On the Kouban--fly, Tartar fleet!
The avenger's falchion gleameth;
His breath--the grapeshot's iron sleet,
His voice--the thunder seemeth!
Around his forehead stern and pale
The fates of war are playing....
He looks--and victory doth quail,
That gesture proud obeying!"

You should witness his coolness in the hour of battle--you should
admire him at a conference: at one time overwhelming the Teberkess
with the flowing orientalisms of the Asiatic, at another
embarrassing their artifices with a single remark. In vain do they
conceal their thoughts in the most secret folds of their hearts; his
eye follows them, disentangles and unrolls them like worms, and
guesses twenty years beforehand their deeds and their intentions.
Then, again, to see him talking frankly and like a friend with his
brave soldiers, or passing with dignity round the circle of the
tchinobniks [28] sent from the capital into Georgia. It is curious to
observe how all those whose conscience is not pure, tremble, blush,
turn pale, when he fixes on them his slow and penetrating glance; you
seem to see the roubles of past bribes gliding before the eyes of the
guilty man, and his villanies come rushing on his memory. You see the
pictures of arrest, trial, judgment, sentence, and punishment, his
imagination paints, anticipating the fu