himself for the Turkish dragoman of a British correspondent whom the Padishah delighted to honour, and that, after expressing a burning desire to defile the graves of their collective female ancestry, he had assured my captors that they might count themselves as dead men if they did not immediately release me.  To his ready-witted conduct I undoubtedly owe the ability to write now this record of a man of curiously complicated nature.

When the campaign ended with the Servian defeat at Djunis, Andreas went back to his headwaitership at the Serbische Krone in Belgrade.  Before leaving that capital I had the honour of being present at his nuptials, a ceremony the amenity of which was somewhat disturbed by the violent incursion into the sacred edifice of sundry ladies all claiming to have prior claims on the bridegroom of the hour.  They were, however, placated, and subsequently joined the marriage feast in the great arbour behind the Krone.  Andreas faithfully promised to come to me to the ends of the earth on receipt of a telegram, if I should require his services, and he were alive.

[Illustration:  “ANDREAS DASHED IN AMONG MY CAPTORS.”]

Next spring the Russo-Turkish war broke out, and I hurried eastward in time to see the first Cossack cross the Pruth.  I had telegraphed to Andreas from England to meet me at Bazias on the Danube below Belgrade.  Bazias is the place where the railway used to end, and where we took steamer for the Lower Danube.  Andreas was duly on hand, ready and serviceable as of old, a little fatter, and a trifle more consequential than when we had last parted.  He was, if possible, rather more at home in Bucharest than he had been in Belgrade, and recommended me to Brofft’s Hotel, in comparison with which the charges of the Brunswick in New York are infinitesimal.  He bought my wagon and team, he found riding horses when they were said to be unprocurable, he constructed a most ingenious tent, of which the wagon was, so to speak, the roof-tree, he laid in stores, arranged for relays of couriers, and furnished me with a coachman in the person of a Roumanian Jew who he one day owned was a distant connection, and whose leading attribute was, that he could survive more sleep than any other human being I have ever known.  We took the field auspiciously, Mr. Frederic Villiers, the war artist of the London Graphic, being my campaigning comrade.  Thus early I discerned a slight rift in the lute.  Andreas did not like Villiers, which showed his bad taste, or rather, perhaps, the narrowness of his capacity of affection; and I fear Villiers did not much like Andreas, whom he thought too familiar.  This was true, and it was my fault; but really it was with difficulty that I could bring myself to treat Andreas as a servant.  He was more, in my estimation, in the nature of the confidential major-domo, and to me he was simply invaluable.  Villiers had to chew his moustache, and glower discontentedly at Andreas.