Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a boisterous, whole-souled old nobleman, came with the rest.  He is a man of progress and enterprise—­a representative man of the age.  He is the Chief Director of the railway system of Russia—­a sort of railroad king.  In his line he is making things move along in this country He has traveled extensively in America.  He says he has tried convict labor on his railroads, and with perfect success.  He says the convicts work well, and are quiet and peaceable.  He observed that he employs nearly ten thousand of them now.

This appeared to be another call on my resources.  I was equal to the emergency.  I said we had eighty thousand convicts employed on the railways in America—­all of them under sentence of death for murder in the first degree.  That closed him out.

We had General Todtleben (the famous defender of Sebastopol, during the siege,) and many inferior army and also navy officers, and a number of unofficial Russian ladies and gentlemen.  Naturally, a champagne luncheon was in order, and was accomplished without loss of life.  Toasts and jokes were discharged freely, but no speeches were made save one thanking the Emperor and the Grand Duke, through the Governor-General, for our hospitable reception, and one by the Governor-General in reply, in which he returned the Emperor’s thanks for the speech, etc., etc.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

We returned to Constantinople, and after a day or two spent in exhausting marches about the city and voyages up the Golden Horn in caiques, we steamed away again.  We passed through the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles, and steered for a new land—­a new one to us, at least—­Asia.  We had as yet only acquired a bowing acquaintance with it, through pleasure excursions to Scutari and the regions round about.

We passed between Lemnos and Mytilene, and saw them as we had seen Elba and the Balearic Isles—­mere bulky shapes, with the softening mists of distance upon them—­whales in a fog, as it were.  Then we held our course southward, and began to “read up” celebrated Smyrna.

At all hours of the day and night the sailors in the forecastle amused themselves and aggravated us by burlesquing our visit to royalty.  The opening paragraph of our Address to the Emperor was framed as follows: 

“We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for recreation—­and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial state—­and, therefore, we have no excuse to tender for presenting ourselves before your Majesty, save the desire of offering our grateful acknowledgments to the lord of a realm, which, through good and through evil report, has been the steadfast friend of the land we love so well.”

The third cook, crowned with a resplendent tin basin and wrapped royally in a table-cloth mottled with grease-spots and coffee stains, and bearing a sceptre