Following along the valley of the River Kur, our train is sometimes rattling along up a wild gorge between rugged heights whose sides are bristling with dark coniferous growth, or more precipitous, with huge jagged rocks and the variegated vegetation of the Caucasus strewn in wild confusion.  Again, we emerge upon a peaceful grassy valley, lovely enough to have been the Happy Valley of Rasselas, and walled in almost completely with forest-clad mountains.  Through it, perhaps, there winds a mountain stream, fed by welling springs and hidden rivulets, and on the stream is sure to be a town or village.  An old Georgian town it would be, picturesque but dirty, built, too, with an eye to security from attack.  One town is particularly noteworthy—­not a very large town, but more important, doubtless, in times past than now.  Out of the valley there rises a rocky butte, abrupt almost as though it were some monstrous vegetable growth.  On the summit of this natural fortress some old Georgian chief had, in the good old days of independence, built a massive castle, and nestling beneath its protecting shadow around the base of the butte is the town, a picturesque town of adobe and wattle walls and quaint red tiles.  So intensely verdant is the valley, so thickly wooded the dark surrounding mountains, so brown the walls, so red the tiles, and so picturesque the elevated castle, that even K goes into raptures, and calls the picture beautiful.

The improvement in the Russian telegraph line, perhaps, owes something to its brief association with the invading stranger from England; and now among the sublime loveliness of this Caucasian Switzerland one finds the station-houses built with far more pretence to the picturesque than on the barren steppes toward Baku and the Caspian.  Here is the Caucasia of our youthful dreams, and the mystic hills and vales whence Mingrelian princes issued forth to deeds of valor in old romantic tales.  Urchins, small mountaineers, more picturesquely clad than anything seen in Alpine Italy, even, now offer us little baskets of wild strawberries at ten copecks a basket-strawberries they and their little brothers and sisters have gathered this very morning at the foot of the hills.  The cuisine at the lunch-counters embraces fresh trout from neighboring mountain streams, caught by vagrant Mingrelian Isaac Waltons, who bring them in on strings of plaited grass to sell.

Humorous scenes sometimes enliven our stops at the stations.  The Russian warnings for travellers to seek the train before it is everlastingly too late cover fully a minute of time.  First come three raps of a bell suspended on the platform, afterward a station employe blows a little whistle, and lastly comes a toot from the engine itself, by way of an ultimatum.  Once this afternoon a woman leaves the train to enter the waiting-room for something.  Just as she is entering, the station-man rings the bell.  The woman, evidently unaccustomed to railway