A series of events occurring immediately after Nagy left for Constantinople resulted in my own unexpected departure for the seat of war in a civil capacity in the Russian army. The series of curious coincidences in the experience of the circus-rider had impressed me very much when he related them, but in the excitement of the Turkish campaign I entirely forgot him and his story. I do not, indeed, recall any thought of Nagy during the first five months in the field. The day after the fall of Plevna I rode towards the town through the line of deserted earthworks. The dead were lying where they had fallen in the dramatic and useless sortie of the day before. The corpses on a battle-field always excite fresh interest, no matter if the spectacle be an every-day one; and as I rode slowly along I studied the attitudes of the dead soldiers, speculating on the relation between the death-poses and the last impulse that had animated the living frame. Behind a rude barricade of wagons and household goods, part of the train of non-combatants which Osman Pasha had ordered to accompany the army in the sortie, a great number of dead lay in confusion. The peculiar position of one of these instantly attracted my eye. He had fallen on his face against the barricade, with both arms stretched above his head, evidently killed instantly. The figure on the alphabet-block, described by the circus-rider, came immediately to my mind. My heart beat as I dismounted and looked at the dead man’s face. It was unmistakably Turkish. This incident revived my interest in the life of the circus-rider, and gave me an impulse to look among the prisoners to see if by chance he might be with them. I spent a couple of days in distributing tobacco and bread in the hospitals and among the thirty thousand wretches herded shelterless in the snow. There were some of the mounted gendarmes among them, and I even found several Hungarians; but none of them had ever heard of the circus-rider. The passage of the Balkans was a campaign full of excitement, and was accompanied by so much hardship that selfishness entirely got the upperhand of me, and life became a battle for physical comfort. After the passage of the mountain range, we went ahead so fast that I had little opportunity, even if I had the enterprise, to look among the few prisoners for the circus-rider.