It is significantly remarked that among the three hundred prisoners--destined to Siberia, I suppose--there is not a single Saxon. There are reasons of state for this discrimination without a doubt. ON A HALT, 5th April, noon. It was not far from sunset last evening when we began to move under the escort of about sixty Cossacks. Our course lay along the east bank of the Elbe, and we are _promised_ to be taken to Russia by way of Berlin. It was near ten o'clock last night before we reached an enclosed farmyard secure enough to hold so many birds, and we went supperless to bed on a munificent litter of straw. Frank's humorous stories and mimicry of our friends the enemies answered admirably for dessert. I was one of the first on foot this morning to take a good look at our escort. These semi-barbarians feel so secure in our utter helplessness that scarcely half a dozen of them remained on guard after the break of day. Here they lay stretched in the dew in every conceivable attitude of well-earned repose, snoring in concert almost under the very feet of their ponies, who enjoy in a standing position their equine dreams of home on the distant steppe. The whole barnyard scene, riders, horses and prisoners, composed one of the most striking pictures of which I ever formed a part, and to which my hasty sketches, herewith enclosed, do not aspire to do justice. These Cossacks, or more properly Bashkirs, seem to belong to a different tribe from the Knights of the Don we captured nearly three weeks ago, and represent mentally and physically a less advanced type. There is no picturing to yourself exactly such faces as these unless you have once seen a specimen, upon which your imagination may then work _ad libitum_, without fear of exaggeration in the direction of the grotesque. A mythological cross between the fabled satyr and the domestic creature which furnishes the Westphalia ham is the nearest approach I can suggest to this type of humanity. How much of their dusky complexion is due to the sun and how much to the earth could only be determined by an exhaustive experiment with soap and water, the virtue of which, to them, is still an undiscovered blessing. To describe the extent to which the Bashkir carries his contempt for cleanliness in every function of daily life would require pages, and prematurely disgust you with my interesting subject. The atmosphere for half a hundred feet around a middle-aged Bashkir has no parallel in any sensation known to the human nostril. His sheepskin cloak, jacket or vest, as the case may be, teems with animal life, of which the wearer alone seems to be unconscious. In feature these people approach the Tartar type, of which, however, the stiff, wispy, yellow hair and beard, the small piggish eye, flat nose and fleshy Ethiopian lips seem to mark a characteristic variety. Many of them walk clumsily or with a stoop, and show other symptoms of grovelling habits and strong drink. As a rule, the Bashkirs,