His military ardour was already fading, so far as the Russian service was concerned, amid his pressing anxiety for the dangers that menaced Natalie; and he felt himself only a species of serf in an imperial uniform. Unlike the Admirals Douglas, Mackenzie, Count Balmaine, and hundreds of other Scotsmen who served the Empress by sea and land, he had thoughtlessly omitted to stipulate, as they had more warily done, that he was to be at perfect liberty, as a British subject, to return to his native land whenever he felt disposed to do so. The poor friendless boy--the kidnapped palatine, who had been rescued from the burning wreck of the _Piscatona_, while floating adrift in the North Sea--could know little how necessary such stipulations were when he joined the Regiment of Smolensko as a cadet; and now he felt himself literally a military slave of the ambitious and lascivious Catharine II. Before him rose the tall fir trees of the forest where he was to meet Olga--the Wood of the Honey Tree, as it was named from an episode (related by Demetrius, the ambassador, in his History of Muscovy) which occurred to a serf of Bernikoff's, Alexis Jagouski, father of the same man whom he slew so wickedly and ungratefully in the flight from Zorndorf; and the whole anecdote reads so very like one of the adventures of Baron Munchausen, or Sir Jonah Barrington's "bounces," that we may be pardoned translating it here. "This man," says Demetrius, "when seeking honey, got into a hollow tree, where the bees had concealed such a quantity thereof, that it sucked him up to the breast, and being unable to extricate himself, he subsisted for two day upon honey alone, and finding that his shouts were answered only by the echoes of the vast forest, he began to despair of being freed from his sweet captivity. At last, to his terror, there came a large brown bear from the Neva, to eat of the honey which the old tree contained, and of which these animals are greedily fond. As the bear was descending with hinder part foremost, the poor serf caught hold of his loins. This sudden grasp among his fur so terrified the bear, that he started and fled, and in doing so, drew the peasant from that sweet prison, which otherwise had proved his grave: hence was the forest named, the Wood of the Honey Tree." There, as Balgonie approached, all was still save the voice of the valdchnep, or woodcock, and the hum of insects; he lingered for a few minutes on the outskirts, just where the highway to Tosna dipped down into a deep and gloomy dingle of intertwisted branches, which formed a species of leafy tunnel overhead.