I have told you in one of my letters, if I remember, that we are returning from the campaign of Akoush, with the commander-in-chief.  We have done our work; Shah Ali Khan has fled into Persia; we have burned a number of villages, hay, and corn; and we have eaten the sheep of the rebels, when we were hungry.  When the snow had driven the insurgents from their mountain-fastnesses, they yielded and presented hostages.  We then marched to the Fort of Bournaya, [27] and from this station our detachment was ordered into winter quarters.  Of this division my regiment forms a part, and our head-quarters are at Derbend.

[Footnote 27:  Stormy.]

The other day, the general, who was about to depart on another campaign on the Line, came to take leave of us, and thus there was a larger company than usual to meet our adored commander.  Alexei Petrovitch came from his tent, to join us at tea.  Who is not acquainted with his face, from the portraits?  But they cannot be said to know Yermoloff at all, who judge of him only by a lifeless image.  Never was there a face gifted with such nobility of expression as his!  Gazing on those features, chiselled in the noble outline of the antique, you are involuntarily carried back to the times of Roman grandeur.  The poet was in the right, when he said of him:—­

  “On the Kouban—­fly, Tartar fleet! 
  The avenger’s falchion gleameth;
  His breath—­the grapeshot’s iron sleet,
  His voice—­the thunder seemeth! 
  Around his forehead stern and pale
  The fates of war are playing.... 
  He looks—­and victory doth quail,
  That gesture proud obeying!”

You should witness his coolness in the hour of battle—­you should admire him at a conference:  at one time overwhelming the Teberkess with the flowing orientalisms of the Asiatic, at another embarrassing their artifices with a single remark.  In vain do they conceal their thoughts in the most secret folds of their hearts; his eye follows them, disentangles and unrolls them like worms, and guesses twenty years beforehand their deeds and their intentions.  Then, again, to see him talking frankly and like a friend with his brave soldiers, or passing with dignity round the circle of the tchinobniks [28] sent from the capital into Georgia.  It is curious to observe how all those whose conscience is not pure, tremble, blush, turn pale, when he fixes on them his slow and penetrating glance; you seem to see the roubles of past bribes gliding before the eyes of the guilty man, and his villanies come rushing on his memory.  You see the pictures of arrest, trial, judgment, sentence, and punishment, his imagination paints, anticipating the future.  No man knows so well how to distinguish merit by a single glance, a single smile—­to reward gallantry with a word, coming from, and going to, the heart.  God grant us many years to serve with such a commander!

[Footnote 28:  Literally, a person possessing rank, used here to signify an employe of Government in a civil capacity—­all of whom possess some definite precedence or class (tchin) in the state. ]