Our party was joined at Nish by a son of the Duke of Cambridge, Colonel FitzGeorge, and a Captain James, who had come over with him from Widdin. I bought a capital grey pony from James for £8, and I always fancy that he imagined I had got at him over the bargain. However, _caveat emptor_ is an admirable maxim in horse-dealing; and the law presumably imagines the vendor capable of looking after himself, as no maxim has been framed for his guidance. At any rate the grey pony stood me in good stead; and in our nightly race home from the mineral spring, or the particular Bulgarian village which we happened to be patronizing with a visit, I generally finished in the first three. It was a flat race of course, for you can walk from one end of the country to the other without meeting a fence of any kind. At night after dinner the entire British medical staff at Nish, supported by FitzGeorge and James, were in the habit of discussing the Eastern Question in all its bearings, not from the outside point of view of the unprejudiced observer, but with the keenness of people who felt that they had a close personal interest in the solution of the problem. There were not wanting alarmists, who took the cheerful view that, if disaster overtook the Turkish arms, the exasperated Turks would turn their swords against the Giaours in their own ranks, and we should all get our throats cut for our pains. One of the speakers who invariably ranged himself on the side of the minority in these discussions, and whose chief delight it was to be the Ishmael of debate with his hand against every man and every man's hand against him, was an extraordinary man named Foley, who quarrelled violently with every one of us except, I think, myself. Afterwards, just before the Russian war broke out, the poor fellow met a tragic end. He was quartered near Sistova in a Bulgarian house on the bank of the Danube, and it was found one morning that he had disappeared. His fate was a mystery which was never cleared up; and whether he drowned himself in the Danube, or was knocked on the head by some wandering Circassians, we were never able to find out. Another of my comrades at Nish was Ralph Leslie, a Canadian, who has had a fairly adventurous career, and was afterwards with Stanley on the Congo. He was a nice young fellow; but he used to read _Gil Blas_ to me in French when I was in bed at night and required all my energies to circumvent the strategy of the Bulgarian insects.