This custom, which prevails throughout the East, was once turned to account by an Afghan who was afterwards discovered to be an Hazara sapper from the Kabul garrison. Disguised as a water-seller he spent three weeks at Kushkinski Post, conducting an exhaustive inspection of the works and coming every night and morning to the fort with his supplies of water. Chance, which in Asia plays no less a part in the affairs of man than in Europe, threw across his path a native who had visited Kabul some weeks before with letters from the Governor-General of Turkestan. The Afghan had been deputed by the Amir to attend to the Turkestani. He had met and escorted him to the capital and back again to the western boundary. As the Russian had entered Afghanistan from the Kushkinski Post, along the Hari Rud valley, he was conducted from the capital to the frontier by the route he had first followed. At the frontier he had dismissed his Afghan attendant, who promptly proceeded to disguise himself as a water-carrier and to obtain admission to the station. Here he busied himself daily until, meeting of a sudden his late charge, recognition upon the part of the Russian subject was immediate and the spy was arrested in the act of escaping from the precincts of the fort. Suspicion as to the man’s identity became assured when a packet of notes was found, wrapped in a rubber sheath, at the bottom of the goat-skin water-bag. Until the advent of the railway the colony at Kushkinski Post apart from the garrison, comprised a few Armenian and Persian traders. With the prolongation of the line from Merv the civilian population began to increase rapidly. There is, of course, no hotel in the station; although the officers of the garrison have established a small military club wherein they mess together and where, when the bi-weekly trains bring the supply of ice, there is usually an animated gathering of desolated humanity. At the present time there are in Kushkinski Post 123 buildings, of which some thirty odd belong to private persons. Apart from the garrison the civil population numbers fifty people. [Illustration: NATIVE WATER-SELLERS] Kushkinski Post station consists of a handsome, spacious structure in the white stone which is brought from quarries in the basin of the Kushk. The railway buildings include a depôt with workshops, eight bungalows for the heads of the staff and special quarters for the employés. There are also large barracks for the 6th Company of the 1st Trans-Caspian Railway Battalion, who are not included in the field state of the post. All buildings are lighted by electricity and the workshops are furnished with electric motors, while the water is drawn from springs on Gumesli mountain.