Our return was set for the month of May; it was still three months to that time. We proposed to use these on a work which one of my husband’s friends, a Tiflis journalist, had urged us to undertake. This was a French and German translation of the national epic of Georgia, “The Tiger’s Skin,” by Shosta Rustaveli. As we did not know the Georgian language thoroughly, the work was to be done in this way: Mr. M—— (his name, all except the initial, has slipped from my memory) was to give us the poetry literally in such imperfect French as he knew; we would then translate this into correct French, and from that into German. There was at that time a plan of bringing out a great holiday edition of “The Tiger’s Skin,” for which the painter Zychy had drawn splendid illustrations. In order to be able to carry out this work undisturbed, we accepted Mr. M——’s invitation to move with him to a remote Mingrelian village where his father was the _pope_ and owned a little house, in which he would take us as boarders for a nominal sum. There we could regularly devote two morning hours and two afternoon hours to “The Tiger’s Skin,” and the rest of the time we spent in walking, reading, and “looking forward” (a business in itself) to the coming journey home. We enjoyed twice as much as ever the wildness, the primitive conditions, of that Caucasian solitude, in anticipation of once more plunging into the bustle of European civilization. The little house that we inhabited was, so to speak, not furnished at all; we had brought with us for our room our own _takhta_ and a few other conveniences, among them a zither. This is, to be sure, not one of the indispensable comforts of life; but, as we had no piano, we satisfied our craving for music with the little Styrian instrument, on which I played accompaniments for my sentimental songs and My Own twanged most lively heel-tapping Ländler.