I owe the opportunity afforded me for writing to you from this wretched place to an accident which has befallen my best horse, and will delay me possibly for another couple of days. The mischance is doubly unfortunate at this moment, inasmuch as reports from our front lead to the supposition that an important engagement is at hand. Any adequate analysis of the rumours that reach me constantly, contradictory as they are, continually varied, chequered with additions and omissions, and burdened with the extravagant local interest environing some wholly trivial circumstance, would be as entirely out of the question for me as for any of your readers at home. Indeed, your readers are certainly infinitely better informed than I am as to current events. When I left Trebizonde, five days ago, the town was in a state of fevered anxiety, of enthusiastic anticipation, tempered in some sober quarters by a quiet but not ungenerous scepticism born of previous experience. The English were coming, cried the enthusiasts. Three English Army Corps (Heaven alone knows whence it was proposed to get them) were on their way to Trebizonde, to Samsoun, and to Shumla to aid their Turkish and Italian allies. The eastern division of the Mediterranean Fleet had already entered the Black Sea, as much to the surprise (and perhaps, somewhat to the chagrin) of the Turkish commanders at the Dardanelles and the Kavaks as of the generals of Russia and of France. In Trebizonde and the surrounding villages a certain basis of probability was built beneath these rumours by the fact that English agents had, for a week, been purchasing mules, sheep, and cattle, at, as is usual with British agents in times of stress, some five times their market value to any other purchaser. Nor have the native producers profited more than usual by this large-handed generosity, for some two or three Greek and Armenian traders, anticipating, as is their wont, honest English procrastination, have been beforehand with the army agents, with whom they are now dealing at altogether fancy prices. This, however, is after all but a small matter beside the great question of our intervention. That England’s action should invariably be delayed almost (but never quite) until too late—that her transports should reach their destination empty, her troops be either unprovided with cartridges, or supplied with those of some obsolete and useless pattern—that by every mistake ineptitude can secure or official ignorance produce, all arrangements connected with the disembarkation and provisioning, and general welfare of whatever forces have been tardily despatched, must inevitably break down but for the tireless energy, the unfailing resource, the unremitting good temper and never-flagging loyalty of all the officers and men thus maltreated, are matters which have long since come to be as well known abroad as they are beginning to be recognised at home. ‘The English,’ said the