If you could speak with this poor Bulgarian, you would find his mind as waste as the land around you. He is a Christian after a fashion, but he puts far more faith in charms, in amulets, and in an uncleanly priest and a certain saint of his village, than in prayer or works. He believes the Turks are his natural masters; that he must endure meekly what they please to inflict, and that between him and Heaven there is only one power and one man strong enough to save him from the most cruel outrages, or to withstand the sovereign sway of the Osmanli--and that power is Russia, and that man is the Czar. His whole fortune is that wretched cart, which he regards as a triumph of construction; and he has driven those lean, fierce-eyed buffaloes many a mile, from some distant village, in the hope of being employed by the commissariat, who offer him what seems to him to be the most munificent remuneration of 3_s._ 4_d._ a day for the services of himself, his beasts, and araba. His food is coarse brown bread, or a mess of rice and grease, flavoured with garlic, the odour of which has penetrated his very bones, and spreads in vapour around him. His drink is water, and now and then an intoxicating draught of bad raki or sour country wine. In that abject figure you look in vain for the dash of Thracian blood, or seek the descendant of the Roman legionary. From whatever race he springs, the Bulgarian peasant hereabouts is the veriest slave that ever tyranny created, and as he walks slowly away with downcast eyes and stooping head, by the side of his cart, the hardest heart must be touched with pity at his mute dejection, and hate the people and the rule that have ground him to the dust. [Sidenote: THE COMMISSARIAT.]