and these commodious and substantial retreats are absolutely necessary for the safety of Erzingan and Trebizond caravans during the winter.  The country now continues hilly rather than mountainous The road is generally too heavy with sand and dust, churned up by the Erzingan mule-caravans, to admit of riding wherever the grade is unfavorable; but much good wheeling surface is encountered on long, gentle declivities and comparatively level stretches.

During the forenoon I meet a company of three splendidly armed and mounted Circassians; they remain speechless with astonishment until I have passed beyond their hearing; they then conclude among themselves that I am something needing investigation; they come galloping after me, and having caught up, their spokesman gravely delivers himself of the solitary monosyllable, “Russ?” “Ingilis,” I reply, and they resume the even tenor of their way without questioning me further.  Later in the day the hilly country develops into a mountainous region, where the trail intersects numerous deep ravines whose sides are all but perpendicular.  Between the ravines the riding is ofttimes quite excellent, the composition being soft shale, that packs down hard and smooth beneath the animals’ feet.  Deliciously cool streams flow at the bottom of these ravines.  At one crossing I find an old man washing his feet, and mournfully surveying sundry holes in the bottom of his sandals; the day is hot, and I likewise halt a few minutes to cool my pedal extremities in the crystal water.  With that childlike simplicity I have so often mentioned, and which is nowhere encountered as in the Asiatic Turk, the old fellow blandly asks me to exchange my comparatively sound moccasins for his worn-out sandals, at the same time ruefully pointing out the dilapidated condition of the latter, and looking as dejected as though it were the only pair of sandals in the world.

This afternoon I am passing along the same road where Mahmoud Ali’s gang robbed a large party of Armenian harvesters who had been south to help harvest the wheat, and were returning home in a body with the wages earned during the summer.  This happened but a few days before, and notwithstanding the well-known saying that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, one is scarcely so unimpressionable as not to find himself involuntarily scanning his surroundings, half expecting to be attacked.  Nothing startling turns up, however, and at five o’clock I come to a village which is enveloped in clouds of wheat chaff; being a breezy evening, winnowing is going briskly forward On several threshing-floors.  After duly binning, I am taken under the protecting wing of a prominent villager, who is walking about with his hand in a sling, the reason whereof is a crushed finger; he is a sensible, intelligent fellow, and accepts my reply that I am not a crushed-finger hakim with all reasonableness; he provides a substantial supper of bread and yaort, and then installs me in