A fine old Frenchman commanded the little Messageries steamer, and by his manner and language he seemed a regular old aristocrat, who had not always been running a small "tramp" boat on the Black Sea. Although far from Paris, he had not forgotten the principles of gastronomy, and the cuisine on board that perambulating little tub was simply perfect. I had never lived so well in my life. We had a delightful passage up the Black Sea, calling in at the different ports on the north side, Sinope, Samsoun, and finally Trebizond, where we disembarked for the overland journey to Erzeroum. Trebizond is a beautiful town built on a table-land at the top of high cliffs looking down over the Black Sea. There was a very good Greek hotel there, and we put up for the night in it. As soon as possible we called on Mr. Biliotti,[4] the English consul at Trebizond, and he gave us a message to push on to Erzeroum as quickly as possible, as Mukhtar Pasha was in urgent need of medical officers and stores. With Mr. Biliotti we met Captain McCalmont, who was on the staff of Sir Arnold Kemball, the British military attaché in Asiatic Turkey. All the preliminaries for our journey had been settled by the indefatigable Mr. Biliotti; and as we had two dragomen, I left one of them, a man named Williams, behind us to bring on the heavy packages, the bandages, drugs, stimulants, and other medical stores, while we pushed forward with the other. When we left Trebizond, our party consisted of Dr. Woods, Captain Morisot, Harvey, and myself. We started early in the morning for our long ride to Erzeroum through the wild and picturesque country which ethnologists and philologists have alike decided upon as the cradle of the human race, and where biblical legend, agreeing with the conclusions of science, has placed the primitive Garden of Eden. The road that we travelled was a splendid one, macadamized nearly all the way, and built in that solid and enduring form that men gave to their highways before the railways came to compete with them. It was this road that Xenophon travelled with his legions over two thousand years ago when they made their famous return march to Greece. Readers of that dead-and-gone Greek captain's diary will remember his explicit description of the journey, and his continually recurring remark that they came after a stage of so many "parasangs" to "a populous town, well watered, and situated on a river." Since Xenophon's day most of those populous towns have disappeared, and nothing is left but the beetling cliffs that frowned down upon the homeward marching Greeks, and the sea that ripples as fresh and blue to-day as when the hoplites and the bowmen saw it gleaming at last before them and ran forward with the glad, exulting cry, "Thalassa, Thalassa!"