line of retirement along which Andreas was sulking.  Andreas saw them too, and retreated no step further, but cut across to them, snatching up a gun as he ran, and the last I saw of him was while he was waving on the militiamen with his billycock, and loosing off an occasional bullet, while he emitted yells of defiance against the Turks, which might well have struck terror into their very marrow.  Andreas came into camp at night very streaky with powder stains, minus the lobe of one ear, uneasy as he caught my eye, yet with a certain elateness of mien.  I sacked him that night, and he said he didn’t care, and that he was not ashamed of himself.  Next morning, as I was rising, he rushed into the tent, knelt down, clasped my knees, and bedewed my ankles with his tears.  Of course I reinstated him; I couldn’t do without him, and I think he knew it.

[Illustration:  “SNATCHING UP A GUN AS HE RAN.”]

But I had yielded too easily.  Andreas had established a precedent.  He insisted, in a quiet, positive manner, on accompanying me to every subsequent battle; and I had to consent, always taking his pledge that he would obey the injunctions I might lay upon him.  And, as a matter of course, he punctually and invariably violated that pledge when the crisis of the fighting was drawing to a head, and just when this “peace at any price” man could not control the bloodthirst that was parching him.

One never knows how events are to fall out.  It happened that this resolution on the part of Andreas to accompany me into the fights once assuredly saved my life.  It was on the day of Djunis, the last battle fought by the Servians.  In the early part of the day there was a good deal of scattered woodland fighting in front of the entrenched line, which they abandoned when the Turks came on in earnest.  Andreas and I were among the trees trying to find a position from which something was to be seen, when all of a sudden I, who was in advance, plumped right into the centre of a small scouting party of Turks.  They tore me out of the saddle, and I had given myself up for lost—­for the Turks took no prisoners, their cheerful practice being to slaughter first and then abominably to mutilate—­when suddenly Andreas dashed in among my captors, shouting aloud in a language which I took to be Turkish, since he bellowed “Effendi” as he pointed to me.  He had thrown away his billycock and substituted a fez, which he afterwards told me he always carried in case of accidents, and in one hand he waved a dingy piece of parchment with a seal dangling from it, which I assumed was some obsolete firman.  The result was truly amazing, and the scene had some real humour in it.  With profound salaams, the Turks unhanded me, helped me to mount, and, as I rode off at a tangent with Andreas at my horse’s head, called after me what sounded like friendly farewells.  When we were back among the Russians—­I don’t remember seeing much of the Servians later on that day—­Andreas explained that he had passed