Dr. Black was by no means a credit to his country. In fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, he was a perfect disgrace; and as every fresh scrape that he got into reflected more or less upon me, I began to get heartily sick of him. Few of the people in Widdin had ever seen an Englishman, and Dr. Black's manners and customs were not calculated to prejudice them favourably with regard to the nation in general or myself in particular. Fortunately for me there was one other Briton in the town. To use a convenient Irishism, he was a Scotsman, and he was commonly known as Jack; in fact, I never heard his surname. Jack was a high-class mechanical engineer, and he had been specially imported from Glasgow to take charge of the Government flour-mill inside the fortress. He lived there with his wife, a charming little Scotswoman, and they both spoke Turkish like natives. I had many consultations with Jack as to our common _bête noir_ Dr. Black; but we had to suffer in silence for a while until the whirligig of time brought its revenges, and Dr. Black was at last turned out of Widdin. I had met Dr. Black before in Sofia, and it was with intense disgust that I came across him again in Widdin. He was a middle-aged man, who might possibly have been of some good in his profession when he was younger; but he had spoiled his life and ruined his chances with drink. He was the most awful drunkard I have ever met. In fact, he was never sober, and in his habits he was perfectly filthy. He used to wear a long, dirty overcoat, in one pocket of which he invariably carried a bottle of the commonest and vilest rum, while in the other he carried a loaded revolver, with which he would blaze away at any one who gave him the slightest provocation. On one occasion I saw him stagger into a Bulgarian boot shop and yell out in English to the proprietor, "Give me a pair of boots, you ----!" Of course the Bulgarian could not understand, so Black whipped out his revolver and blazed a few cartridges away among the stock in trade before the trembling cobbler could pacify him. He was perpetually firing off this weapon, and he was such a terror to the unfortunate Bulgarians in whose houses he was quartered, that he was never allowed to stay more than a week at a time in one place. At last he became such a nuisance that old Hassib Bey, a most courtly old Turkish gentleman, who was the head of the hospital, sent for me, and asked me what on earth they were to do with this compatriot of mine. I suggested that he should be quartered in the military hospital, where he would have fewer opportunities of being a nuisance, and my suggestion, which was adopted, speedily brought matters to a crisis.