Riding in double file, and led by an officer who wore the usual long coat with silver shoulder-straps and a stiff flat forage-cap, a party of forty Cossacks issued slowly from the defile. Their leader was either a staff-officer or a member of some other force, as his uniform was quite different from theirs, which declared them to be Tchernimorski Cossacks, the tribe who inhabit the peninsula of Tamar, and all the country between the Kuban and Asof, being literally the Cossacks of the Black Sea, and natives of the district. They carried their cartridges ranged across their breast in rows of tin tubes, _à la Circassienne_, and were all bronzed, bearded, and rough-looking men, whose whole bearing spoke of Crimean and Circassian service, of hard outpost work among the wild Caucasus, of many a bloody conflict with Schamyl--conflicts in which quarter was neither asked nor given! I had never been quite so near those wild warriors of the Russian steppes before, and have no desire ever to be so again, at least under the same dubious circumstances. They wore little squab-shaped busbies of brown fur; sheepskin shoubahs, or cloaks, over their coarse green uniforms; and had trusses of straw and bags of corn so secured over the shoulders and cruppers of their small shaggy horses, that but little more of the latter were visible than their noses and tails. They rode with their knees high and stirrup-leathers short, their lances slung behind them, and carbines rested on the right thigh. Captivity or escape, life or death, were in the balance as they slowly rode onward; but favoured by the already failing light and the falling snow, I am now inclined to think that my figure should have escaped even their keen and watchful eyes, had not evil fortune caused my horse, on discovering a mare or so among their cattle, after snuffing the air with quivering nostrils, to whinny and to neigh! At that moment we were not more than fifty yards apart. A shout, or rather a series of wild cries, escaped the Cossacks. I pressed the spurs into the flanks of my gallant black horse, and he sprang away with a wild bound; while the bullets from nearly twenty carbines whistled past me harmlessly, thank heaven, and I rode steadily away--away. I cared not in what direction now, so that the more pressing danger was eluded, while cries and threats, and shot after shot followed me; but I had no great fear of them so long as they fired from the saddle, experience having taught me that even the best-trained cavalry are but indifferent marksmen. Before me rose the green ridge of Mount Yaila; the ground was somewhat open there, being pastoral hill-slopes gradually culminating in those peaks, from whence, in a clear day, the snow-clad summits of the Caucasus can be discerned; and to reach a ravine or cleft in the hills before me, I strained every effort of my horse, hoping, with the coming night, to escape, or find some shelter by the seashore.