sum was a bad precedent, likely to encourage the mountaineers to renew the extortion, instead of contenting themselves, as they previously had done, with a few hundred rubles; and, secondly, as a prisoner, Baron Turnau would perhaps have opportunities of gathering valuable information concerning a country and people of whom little or nothing was known. The unfortunate young officer was cruelly sacrificed to these considerations, and passed a long winter in terrible captivity, tortured by frost and hunger, compelled, as a slave, to the severest labour, and often greatly ill-treated. Several attempts at flight failed; and at last the chief, in whose hands he was, confined him in a cage half-buried in the ground, and withal so narrow that its inmate could neither stand upright nor lie at length." [3] The reference in this instance is more particularly to the land of the Ubiches and Tchigetes, two tribes that abide south of Circassia Proper, and whose language differs from those of the Circassians and Abchasians, their neighbours to the north and south. The general medium of conversation amongst the various Caucasian tribes is the Turkish-Tartar dialect, current amongst most of the dwellers on the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas. Thus immured, a prey to painful maladies, his clothes rotting on his emaciated limbs, the unhappy man moaned through his long and sleepless nights, and gave up hope of rescue. No tender-hearted Circassian maiden brought to him, as to the hero of Pushkin's well-known Caucasian poem, deliverance and love. Such luck had been that of more than one Russian captive; but poor Turnau, in his state of filth and squalor, was no very seductive object. He might have pined away his life in his cage, before Baron Rosen, or his paternal majesty the Czar, had recalled his fate to mind, but for an injury done by his merciless master to one of his domestics, who vowed revenge. Watching his opportunity, this servant, one day that the rest of the household were absent, murdered his lord, released the prisoner, tied him with thongs upon his saddle, upon which the baron, covered with sores and exhausted by illness, was unable to support himself, and galloped with him towards the frontier. In one day they rode eighty _versts_, (about fifty-four English miles,) outstripped pursuers, and reached Fort Ardler. The accounts given by Baron Turnau of the land of his captivity could be but slight: he had seen little beyond his place of confinement. What he did relate was not very encouraging to Russian invasion. He depicted the country as one mass of rock and precipice, partially clothed with vast tracts of aboriginal forest, broken by deep ravines and mountain torrents, and surmounted by the huge ice-clad pinnacles of the loftiest Caucasian ridge. The villages, some of which nestle in the deep recesses of the woods, whilst others are perched upon steep