shouting and the musketry, rises the voice of the Circassian chief who leads on and deals out destruction until the last Muscovite bites the dust. The stanitza making no resistance, the work of pillage is soon done; whereupon the troop having picked up their dead and wounded, turn their horses' heads again towards the mountains. When the Cossacks come in with their reinforcements it is too late. They are only in time to behold the stanitza in flames, the fort in ruins from the explosion of its magazines, and the victors, their cruppers piled high with goods, and women, just gaining the opposite bank, or crossing the hill-top, on the other side of which lie both safety and freedom. Sometimes the Circassians dash through between the forts without stopping to attack them, and suffering, perhaps, somewhat from the cross-fire, gain the country beyond the line, where they find more abundant spoils and no resistance. But on their return, they are sure to encounter the Cossacks drawn up at the ford, or some other point convenient for disputing the passage to an enemy encumbered with booty. These Russian hirelings, however, the freemen of the mountains despise, and with superior horses ride them down. Only when the espionage which is maintained among all the tribes on the border--for everywhere there are souls which can be bought for gold--succeeds in procuring for their enemies information of any incursion before it takes place, is the foray rendered unsuccessful and the troop cut off. XXIX. RUSSIAN MODE OF WARFARE The Russian mode of conducting the invasion of the Caucasus has been different at different times. When the Emperor Nicholas, after the treaty of Adrianople in 1829, revived the old war with Circassia in order to compel by force of arms the acknowledgment of those pretended rights of supremacy which by that treaty had been made over to him by Turkey, he supposed that his Cossacks, aided by a small force of infantry, would be sufficient to intimidate the mountaineers and to accomplish his purpose. Earlier in the century, Russia had acquired from Persia the vast provinces of the southern Caucasus, and had afterwards, partly by the consent of the tribes and partly by force, succeeded in keeping open the two great routes to these possessions, the one along the Caspian, and the other over the centre of the chain by the pass of Dariel. It remained therefore to subjugate only that portion of the Caucasus not included in the territories adjacent to these two roads, and lying the larger portion of it south of the Kuban, and the smaller south of the Terek.