travel, rushes hastily back to the train.  Everybody greets her performance with good-natured merriment.  Finding the train not pulling out, and encouraged by some of the passengers, the woman ventures to try it again.  As she reaches the waiting-room door, the station-man blows a shrill blast on his whistle.  The woman rushes back, as before.  Again the people laugh, and again words of encouragement tempt her to venture back again.  This time it is the toot of the engine that brings that poor female scurrying back across the platform amid the unsympathetic laughter of her fellow-passengers, and this time the train really starts.  From this it would appear that too many signals are quite as objectionable at railway-stations as not signals enough.  Every stoppage at a lunch-counter station, or where venders of things edible come on the platform, gives us opportunity to turn our minds judicially upon the civilization of our fellow first-class passengers.  They present a curious combination of French fashion and polite address, on the one hand, and want of taste and ignorance of civilization’s usages on the other.  Gentlemen and ladies, dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, stand out on the platform and devour German sausage or dig their teeth into big chunks of yellow cheese with the gusto of half-starved barbarians.

We double our engines—­our compact, tenderless, petroleum-burning engines—­at the foot of the Suran Pass.  At its base, a stream disappears in an arched cave at the foot of a towering rocky cliff, and I have bethought me since of whether, like Allan Quatermain’s subterranean stream, it would, if followed, reveal things heretofore unseen.  And so we climb the lovely Suran Pass, rattle down the western slope upon the Black Sea coast, and reach Batoum at 11 p.m.

As the chief mercantile port of the Caucasus, Batoum is an important shipping point.  By the famous Berlin treaty it was made a free port; but nothing is likely to remain free any length of time upon which the Russian bear has managed to lay his greedy paw.  Consequently, Batoum is now afflicted with all sorts of commercial taxes and restrictions, peculiar to a protective and autocratic semi-Oriental government.  Notwithstanding this, however, ships from various European ports crowd its harbor, for not only is it the shipping point of Baku petroleum, but also the port of entry for much of the Persian and Central Asian importations from Europe.  An oil-pipe line is seriously contemplated from Baku to replace the iron-tank cars now run on the railroad.

Big fortifications are under headway to protect the harbor; its strategic importance as the terminus of the Caucasus Railway and the shipping point for troops and war material making Batoum a place of special solicitation on the part of the Russian military authorities.  R------and I walk around and take a look at the fortification works, as well as one can do this; but no strangers are allowed very near, and we are conscious of close surveillance the whole time we are walking out near the scene of operations.