places was streaked with blood. The elderly lady, a keen-looking woman, evidently with a dash of the nomadic Tartar in her blood, asked me rather imperiously some questions in Russian--that language which Golovine so rightly says "is altogether inaccessible to foreigners;" but the other added, in softer French, "Who are you, and from whence do you come?" I replied that I was a British officer from the army before Sebastopol, wounded and unhorsed in a recent skirmish with Cossacks; that I had lost my way, and was literally perishing of cold, hunger, and loss of blood. "How come you to be here, as you have no troops in this quarter?" asked the young lady, to my surprise and pleasure, in English, which she spoke fluently, but with a pretty foreign accent. "I lost my way, I have said, and being pursued have ridden far in a wrong direction." "Far, indeed, from Sebastopol at least; do you know where you are, sir?" "No." "This is Prince Woronzow's castle of Yalta." "Yalta!" "On the shore of the Black Sea," she added, smiling brightly at my surprise. "Then I am more than thirty miles in _rear_ of the Russian posts in the valley of Inkermann!" "Yes; and as a soldier, must know that you are in great danger of the darkest suspicions if you are taken." "I am aware of that," said I, faintly, as a giddiness came over me, and I leaned against the open sash of the window; "but I care not what happens." The elder lady, who had a son with the army in Sebastopol, now said something energetically, and in my favour apparently, and the other added, softly and kindly, "Enter, sir, and we shall succour you." The closed sashes excluded the icy air, I felt myself within the warm influence of the peitchka, and then the three smarting lance-wounds began to bleed afresh. "Madame Tolstoff," said the younger lady, in French, "we must act warily here, if we would prevent this poor fellow becoming a prisoner of war, or worse. Bring here old Ivan Yourivitch the _dvornik_." This was the butler, but it also signifies "servant." "Can you trust him in this matter?" "In any matter, implicitly. His wife nursed me and my brother too. There is a perilous romance in all this, and to his care I shall consign our unfortunate visitor, who does seem in a very bad way."