August 22.--Rain was falling as we slowly steamed away from the station; it is almost always raining at Batum. The clouds cannot leap the gigantic bulwark of the mountains at this south-eastern angle of the sea; they cling to the fir-clad slopes or put out hands and scale the escarpments until they become exhausted and dissolve. The town was soon behind us as we wound along the foot of the range on the narrow respite of the shore--Batum, with her grim defiance of the written law of Europe, with her peaceful situation at the gate of the oil industry, of which she receives the products by the railway from the Caspian to distribute them over all the world; a creation of modern Russia on the familiar official pattern of spreading boulevards with fine shops and large hotels. Here is the starting-point of the first train which skirts the coast of the Euxine--and even this remote example of the species turns aside from the mysterious seaboard to the cities of the interior after a brief space of some twenty miles. Yet within such limits we are carried through the wildest piece of country that may be found between the mouth of the river Rion and the entrance to the Black Sea, a district endowed with extraordinary fertility, which still remains unexploited and unreclaimed. It is inhabited here and there by a few straggling settlements, which contrast to the splendour of his natural surroundings the squalor of uncivilised man. We have outreached the furthest extension of the fringe of Greek elements; Georgian peoples live in the valleys of the interior and are thinly scattered upon the malarious coast; while further east, where the chain has left the sea and is aligned upon the plains, lowlands as well as mountains, the skirts of the range and its innermost recesses are the home of a population of Georgian race. Between Trebizond and the Russian fortress first the Lazis and then the Ajars may perhaps be regarded as transitional factors to the new order which commences after you have left Batum. I should not venture to pronounce upon the racial connections of the Lazis; they may represent the aboriginal occupants of their country, the wild tribes who harassed the army of Xenophon and were the settled plague of the Byzantine governors and of the emperors of the Comnenian line. The Ajars would appear to be of mixed parentage; like the Lazis they profess the Mohammedan faith. The Georgian districts which we are now entering still retain the names of the several independent principalities to which they formerly belonged, and except in the case of Abkhasia, up in the north at the foot of Caucasus, the Christian religion almost exclusively prevails. First comes Guria along the shore and the bend of the mountains; Imeritia extends on either bank of the Rion and as far as the pass of Suram; Mingrelia is the name of the country on the north of the Kolchian river, and it is bounded by Imeritia in the east.