Once among our visitors came Prince Menschikoff himself, Valerie advised my non-appearance, much to my relief; but I heard the din of voices, the laughter, and the sound of music in the _salon_ or great dining-room where a _déjeûner_ was served for him and his staff, while the band of the Grand Duchess Olga's Hussars were stationed in the marble vestibule, and played the grand national anthem of Russia and Luloff's famous composition, _Borshoe zara brangie_--God save the Emperor. After the Prince's departure we had the huge mansion entirely to ourselves again, and any longings I might have to rejoin the Welsh Fusileers and share the dangers they underwent, together with my natural anxiety to hear of my friends in their ranks, I was compelled to stifle and seek to forget, when tidings came that a great body of Tchernimorski Cossacks had formed a temporary camp between Yalta and the head of the long Baidar Valley, thus, while they remained, completely cutting off all my chances of reaching either Balaclava or the Allied camp; so there was nothing for me now but to resign myself to a protracted residence in the same luxurious mansion with the brilliant Valerie (and her watchful chaperone), with the somewhat certain chance of losing my heart in the charms, of her society. Madame Tolstoff assuredly kept guard over us with Argus eyes; but a few of the devices in the heart that laugheth at locksmiths enabled me to elude her at times; while, fortunately for me, the language we spoke was perfectly unknown to her; yet "the Tolstoff," as I used to call her, seemed, I knew not why, to exercise considerable control over Valerie. In her youth she had been carried off by Schamyl's mountaineers from a Russian outpost, and was a detained for three years in the Caucasian chief's seraglio, where, with all my heart, I wished her still. But while enjoying all the good things of this life at Yalta--grapes, melons, and pineapples from Woronzow's hothouses at Alupka, oysters from Hamburg, pickled salmon from Ladoga, sterlit from the Volga, sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, reindeer's tongue from Archangel, Crimean wines that nearly equalled champagne, imitation Sillery from the Don, Cliquot, Burgundy, and Bordeaux,--I thought often with compunction of the wretched rations and hard fare of our poor fellows who were starving in the winter camp. Volhonski was wealthy, and thus his sister and her attendants were able to command every luxury. His rank was high, for he claimed, as usual with all the Russian nobles of the first _tchinn_ or class, to be descended from Ruric the Norman--Ruric of Kiev and Vladimir--who, more than a thousand years ago, founded the dynasty by which Muscovy was governed prior to the accession of the Romanoffs. All the best families in the land boast of a descent from Gedemine the Lithuanian, or from this Ruric and his followers; a weakness common also to the English aristocracy, whose genealogical craze is a real or supposed descent