To show, however, that the Muchir, far from oppressing the Bulgarian inhabitants in the manner imputed to him by contemporary press writers, was always throughout the siege absolutely fair towards them, one significant incident may be mentioned for which I can vouch, as I was myself a witness of it. One morning, while I was passing by the yard of a Bulgarian butcher, I found an altercation going on between the Bulgarian and a free-lance from one of the Circassian irregular bodies. Although I could not understand what was said, I was able to gather that the Circassian wanted some meat, which the Bulgarian would not give him. After a minute or two of heated argument, the Circassian drew his revolver and shot the Bulgarian in my presence, the bullet entering the man's foot. I reported the matter to Osman Pasha personally, and he ordered the instant arrest of the Circassian; but the man was never seen again. Recognizing that death would be the penalty of his act if he were discovered, he escaped from Plevna that night, and we saw no more of him. The butcher died from his wound. There was plenty of work for the men of all ranks to do between the 20th of July and the 30th. We never knew when another attack might be launched; and though the Russians had disappeared from sight, our scouts used occasionally to bring in word that they had seen detachments as near as five miles off. Our men were working away as busily as bees fortifying outposts, digging entrenchments, and building redoubts on the cordon of hills that formed the natural rampart of the town. They also had to complete the work of burying the dead, and as the Russians had left us all their dead to inter as well as our own this was no light task. When I had finished my morning's work in the hospital, I used to call on Dr. Robert and borrow one of his smart little black cobs for a ride out to the hills to see how our fellows were getting on with their labours. I often watched the burial squads at work, as I sat there on the black cob puffing a cigarette in the glorious summer weather, and saw them dragging the scattered bodies together into a little heap, and then digging a trench to hold them. Sometimes they would put twenty or thirty into one trench when they came on a patch where the troops had fallen thickly, and sometimes a dead soldier lying far away from his comrades would be buried in a lonely grave by himself. The Russian and Turkish dead were always kept distinct, for the Moslem will not sleep by the Giaour, even in the grave. As I rode over the crest of the hills four or five days after the battle, and down to the hollow where the Russian lines received the hottest of the Turkish fire, I saw that in most cases the Russian dead had not been buried deep enough; now and then, indeed, scarcely more than the three handfuls of dust prescribed by the old poet had been thrown over the corpse, which protested with a faint, sickly odour at these maimed funeral rites.