"May nuggets as big as the hat on your head Be strewn in your path as you journey at will; And veins of rich gold 'neath the ground as you tread Lie hidden perdu, to be won by your skill. "And when thou hast made a fabulous haul, And flooded the market with shares, On thy virtuous life may a blessing befall, To gild thy declining years." Some time after this, some thoughtless youngsters played a practical joke on Mr. Cookson, and pretended to him that it came from Richard, who, on learning it a long time afterwards, felt sorely hurt and mortified that his old friend should have been left in error, and thought him capable of such a thing. To my horror, I had found Richard with a secretly broken head, raw knuckles, and gout in his feet, but he soon got round under my care, and then I took him off to Opçina. He was afraid of meningitis, as they had wounded him just in the _nuque_. The doctor put him under a course of salicin, and at last he had an attack of healthy gout in the feet, which did him good. I got the best doctor, but he knew less about it than we did. Nubar Pasha came over about this time, and came up and stayed with us, and that did him good. He was soon able to breakfast down in the garden. He now began to walk about freely, and to take long drives, even to climb hills. The first excursion that he made was to a _foiba_. This means one of the great pot-holes in the Karso, some of which are a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or two thousand feet deep. Some of the most brutal amongst the peasant Slavs have the habit of throwing their animals down, when they want to get rid of them, and it was said that a dog was thrown down there, and we thought we could hear its moans, so we started off with a large party with endless ropes and grappling irons. He sounded the depths, and at last we seemed to get hold of something, at which all the men pulled and hoisted up a tree. This frightened all the owls who had taken refuge in this hole, and they flew out, and then we found that what we thought was the moaning of the dog was the hooting of these owls. Then our fencing-master, Herr Reich, came up to us frequently, and we had numberless drives over the Karso. "IT." "If all the harm that women have done Were put in a bundle and rolled into one, The earth could not hold it, the sky not enfold it, It could not be lighted nor warmed by the sun! Such masses of evil would puzzle the devil And keep him in fuel while Time's wheels run."