clearly shows that the navigation of the Deryai Amus (Oxus), if not altogether impossible, is a hard problem nevertheless. These, however, are but secondary drawbacks, and in Khiva, as in Bokhara, the white Tzar will be raised aloft upon the white carpet of the Kharezmian princes, if not through the grey-beards of the Tshagatay race, at any rate by his own bayonets and rifled guns. The conquest of the whole right bank of the Ganges once assured to them, the strip of land from Issikköl to the Sea of Aral once come into full possession of the Russians, and well provided with excellent victualling-stores, then will the game of diplomacy have begun in Afghanistan also. Among the Afghans the court of St. Petersburg will not intervene so suddenly with arms in hand; not because England's miscarriage in 1839 has made it cautious, but because such a procedure is by no means customary with the Russians. That, moreover, would be partly superfluous, partly beyond the mark, amidst the now proverbial disunion of Dost Mohammed's successors. Where brother rages against brother in deadliest feud, where intrigues caused by greed and vanity are ever in full swing; there the secret agent, the kind word, a few friendly lines of writing, are much more profitable than a sudden assault with the armed hand. Hitherto, in his brother-strife against Shere-Ali-Khan, Abdurrahman-Khan has in no way entangled himself with Russian agents, although he sought to frighten the English moonshee (agent), by bringing some such conception to his notice. That he was greatly inclined to such a step I have not the slightest doubt; but as yet the Russians have given him no encouragement to take it. For if the Afghan opponents of Shere-Ali-Khan, the Ameer accredited by England, had received but the faintest wink from the Neva, they would never have coquetted with Sir John Lawrence in Calcutta. Not only chiefs and princes, but every Afghan warrior, nay, every shepherd on the Hilmund, puts his trust in the idea of Russian trade; and I have a hundred times over convinced myself how easily, indeed how gladly, these people would embrace a Russian alliance against the masters of Peshawar. Whether the fruits of such a friendship would be wholesome, and conduce to the interests of Afghanistan, no one takes into question. The Afghans, like all Asiatics, look only to the interests of the moment, see only the harm which Afghans have suffered in Kashmere and Sindh through English ascendancy, have a lively remembrance of the last sojourn of the red-jackets in Kabul and Kandahar; and though every one knows that the Kaffirs of Moscow are very little better than the Feringhies, still, from an impulse of revenge, they all desire and will prefer an alliance with the North to a good understanding with England. Hence it is but a friendly regard, it is only a compact upheld not by treaties, but by a strong force on the Oxus, which the Russians can aim at for some time to come.