The scarcest thing with me just now is time.  I might give you a shilling at a pinch, but a half hour is an article which I do not happen to have about me....  By the way, your rhapsody over the East in “M.K.” ["Meister Karl”] had something to do with my acceptance of the Turkish Mission; and if you have been lying, I shall find you out, old boy.

Boker’s enthusiasm for Turkish scenery was unbounded, but his difficulties as a diplomat were due to his ignorance of the tongue, and his distrust of interpreters.  But by the time his Government was ready to transfer him to another post—­that of Minister to Russia (January 3, 1875)—­he was heartily sick of his wrangling with the Crescent, and glad, as he wrote Leland, “to shake the dust of this dismal old city from my shoes, and prepare my toes for a freezing at St. Petersburg.”  He echoed his distaste in later years by writing:  “I hate the East so profoundly that I should not return to it if there were no other land in which I could live.”  This promotion to the Russian court—­it was a Russian, Ignatieff, who characterized him as “of true diplomatic stuff”—­was made in 1875, and he remained there two years.

“While in Russia,” we learn, “he was the only one of our Ministers at foreign courts who was able to checkmate Spain in her controversy with us about the Virginius.  He baffled the Spanish Ambassador at St. Petersburg, and influenced Gortschakoff to send a despatch to Madrid, which caused Spain to apologize to the United States; thus averting serious complications.”

Diplomatic life was not wholly distasteful to him; he possessed social distinction which made him popular at both courts, so much so, indeed, that the Czar cabled to Washington, when a change of administration brought Boker’s tenure of office to a close, asking if it were not possible to have him retained.  He had had his difficulties at the Porte, as Lowell had had at Madrid.  But his artistic nature responded quickly to the picturesqueness of his surroundings.  “Within a mile of me,” he writes Leland from Turkey,—­“for I am now living at Therapia upon the Bosphorus—­there is a delicious encampment of the black tents of a tribe of Gypsies.”  While he was in Russia he was continually supplying Leland with information about gypsies.

He went to Egypt, at the invitation of the Sultan, and—­as though recalling Taylor’s longing, in 1852, when he was in Cairo, to have Boker with him—­took a trip up the Nile, with Leland, whom he had invited to accompany him.  Under the palm trees at Misraim, he had his first meeting with Emerson.  The varied foreign travel had broadened his taste, and he was quickly responsive to what he saw.  Writes Leland: