policy towards Russia, and might in a short time have sunk into the position of a somewhat more important Khudayar or Mozaffur Eddin. Other events intervened, however, and gave a complete change to the question, as will be considered in a later chapter. We take our leave of this narrative of his dealings with Russia with an admiration that would be perfect but for the weakness he exhibited in 1875. Even that vacillation will scarcely destroy all the claim that his bold defiance and consistent opposition to all Russian pretensions to supremacy over Eastern Turkestan gives him to our respectful and admiring consideration. CHAPTER XI. YAKOOB BEG'S RELATIONS WITH ENGLAND. In describing the relations that subsisted between England and Kashgar, while under the rule of Yakoob Beg, there will be no necessity for us to enter so deeply into the under-currents that guided those relations, as was necessary in the preceding chapter, where we detailed the rivalry of Russia and Kashgar. While England could hold out a hand of friendship to the Athalik Ghazi, because he sought to please us by making commercial concessions, Russia felt doubly piqued with the man who for long refused her a similar foothold, and who, for a brief space, went still farther in his defiance, secure--as he thought--under British protection. Our government could not fail to see, in the bold conduct of this ruler, the result of a mistaken notion of what it would do in the event of a war in Central Asia, and it strove to bring home to the mind of Yakoob Beg and his emissaries a sense of our determination not to interfere beyond the Karakoram. Looking back now on the old legends that successive travellers brought us from Eastern Turkestan, where such strange things had been wrought, where the Chinese had been expelled, and a new king from Khokand enthroned, and regarding them in the light of our greatly extended information, even since Mr. Shaw penned his interesting volume on High Tartary, it will not be without some interest to trace back the story of how Yakoob Beg's name first became known to us, and how, for eight or nine years, a large section of Englishmen wove a romance round his name, and converted "the land of the six cities" into a fertile and populous region, which might serve as a barrier to Russian progress, and which, like Cabul elsewhere, should extend as another "cushion" from the mountains of Hindostan to the Celestial range of the Chinese. Those dreams have vanished now, and in their place has risen up the very unromantic and matter-of-fact spectacle of a Chinese triumph.