the writings of Bunson and himself. Ehrenberg then examined the manuscript with his microscope, and discovered that the palimpsest was really later than the more modern one,-the old ink overlaid the new. Simonides' last appearance is a very amusing one: he claims to be the writer of the Codex Sinaiticus of the New Testament, that was discovered by Tischendorf, partly in 1844 and partly in 1859, in one of the monasteries of Mount Athos. The account which Simonides gives of it is that in 1839 the monks of the Russian convent determined to make a transcript of the Scriptures in ancient characters on vellum as a present to the Emperor Nicholas. Dionysius the scribe to the monastery declining to undertake the work, Simonides, the nephew of the head of the monastery, offered to execute it. The Archimandrite, Dionysius of Xeropotami, another monastery on Mount Athos, declares that the story is false in every particular. There is little doubt that the manuscript which has been published so magnificently in four folio volumes at the expense of the Emperor of Russia is the oldest manuscript of the New Testament in existence. I ought perhaps to mention a circumstance which was alluded to at the recent meeting of the British Association. There has very lately been communicated to the French Academy an elaborate correspondence between Newton and Pascal, which, if genuine, would transfer to the latter the honour of the discovery of the law of gravitation. Sir D. Brewster, however, gave, at Dundee, several very strong reasons for considering the correspondence "a gigantic fraud-the greatest ever attempted in the world, connected with science and literature." For the Wall of a Friend's Study. STONE walls, they say, have ears-'Twere scarcely wrong How many gracious words would then be said, What terse quotations fresh applied and fit, No, they their treasured secrets ne'er let fall- A. M. 501 The Abkhasian Insurrection OF AUGUST 8, 1866. Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure. "So'OUK-Soo," or "Cool Waters," is one of the loveliest spots in the lovely province of Abkhasia. Lying only a few miles inland from the eastern Black Sea shore, and on the first rise of the wooded Caucasus, a day's ride north of the town and harbour of Soukhoum-Kalé, it was from old times a favourite summer residence of the chiefs of Abkhasia; their winter was more often passed at Drand or Otchemchiri, farther down the coast. But in addition to its natural beauty and residential importance, this locality has acquired a special title to almost European interest. since August, 1866, when it became the scene and starting-point of an outbreak -disguised in distorted newspaper accounts under fictions of brigandage, slave-driving, and the like, but which was in fact nothing else than an Eastern re-enactment of events familiar, since 1880, to Warsaw and the Western Provinces of the Russian Empire. During the month of November, 1866, while the memories of the Abkhasian insurrection were still recent, and the lingering autumn of the Caucasus yet permitted horse-travelling (for in winter these mountains become totally impassable), we-that is, myself with a Mingrelian servant and guide-arrived at So'ouk-Soo, after a ten hours' ride from SoukhoumKalé, through bush and forest, stream and mire. Roads are luxuries often announced in programme, sometimes talked of, but never seen in these provinces. It was already dark when, after much clambering and slipping, we found ourselves on a sort of plateau, entangled in a labyrinth of hedges, where scattered lights glimmered among the bushwood, and dogs barking in all directions gave us to know that we had reached So'ouk-Soo. Like most other Abkhasian villages, its houses are neither ranged in streets nor grouped in blocks, but scattered as at random, each in a separate enclosure. The houses themselves are one-storied and of wood, sometimes mere huts of wattle and clay; the enclosures are of cut stakes, planted and interwoven latticewise; the spaces between these hedgerows serve for the passage of countless goats and oxen that pass the night within their masters' precincts, and go out to pasture during the day. Old forest-trees, fresh underwood, bramble, and grass grow everywhere, regardless of the houses, which are often in a manner lost among them; one is at times right in the middle of a village before one has even an idea of having approached it. After much hallooing and much answering in sibilants and gutturals,really the Abkhasian alphabet seems to contain nothing else, we prevailed on some peasants to get up and guide us through the darkness to the house of the Natchalnick, or Governor of the district. Here we passed the remainder of the night with his Excellency, a Georgian by birth, and, like every one else of these ilks, who is not of serfish origin, a prince by title, but now an officer in the Russian army, into which the "natives," fond as negroes of gay dress and glitter, are readily attracted by lace and epaulettes. Many of the "princes" of the land-elsewhere chiefs or sheykhs at most-have, on this motive, with the additional hope of a decoration, assumed the badges of Russian military service, wherein they easily obtain subordinate posts; and there aid as spies or as tools in disarming the constantly recurring discontent of their countrymen, till some day or other their own personal discontent breaks out, and then the tool, no longer serviceable, is broken and thrown aside, to be replaced, where wanted, by another. Early next morning, while the dew glittered on the rank grass, and the bright sun shone slant through the yet leafy trees, we rode, accompanied by the "Natchalnick" and his whole suite of Georgians and Mingrelians in Cossack dress, to visit the "Meidan" of So'ouk-Soo, where the first shot of insurrection had been fired four months before. A "Meidan," or "open ground," is-all know who have visited the East the necessary adjunct of every town or village honoured by a chieftain's residence. It serves for town-hall, for park, for parade-ground, for scene of all public gathering, display, business, or amusement. On it is invariably situated the chief's or governor's abode; a mosque, if the land be Mahometan, a church, if Christian, is never wanting; the main street or artery of the locality terminates here. Lastly, it is seldom devoid of a few large trees, the shade of loiterers. The Meidan of So'ouk-Soo offers all these characteristic features, but offers them after a manner indicating the events it has witnessed, and the causes or consequences of those events. It is an open book, legibly written by the Nemesis of history, the "measure for measure," the reciprocated revenges of national follies and national crimes. "Which living waves where thou didst cease to live," says Byron, contrasting the quiet prolonged existence of great nature with the short and turbulent period of human life. Much the same feeling comes over one at So'ouk-Soo. The green grassy plot dotted with noble treesbeech, elm, and oak; around, the swelling uplands, between which the "cool waters" of the torrent-whence the name of the place-rush sparkling down to the blue sea; beyond, the huge Caucasian mountainchain, here seen in all its central magnificence of dark forest below and white fantastic peaks above, in unearthly wildness of outline beyond the dreams of the most enthusiastic pre-Raphaelite landscape-painter; above, the ever-varying sky; around, the fresh hill-breeze: The chiefs of Abkhasia could not have found in all their domains a fairer, a more life-giving place for their residence. But another story is told by the traces of a ruined mosque on one side of the Meidan, and near it some neglected tombs bearing on the carved posts-which here replace monumental stones-the Mahometan symbolic turban. Close by are four wooden crosses, sunk and awry, freshly planted in the still loose mould of as many recent graves. Next, the blackened, walls and empty windows of a large burnt house surrounded by a broken stone-wall. Further on, a second fire-ruin, amid the trees and shrubs of a yet thickly-growing garden. Opposite, on the other side of the Meidan, and alone intact and entire, as though triumphing over the ruin it has in no small measure caused, stands a church-a small building of the semi-Byzantine style usual in Russian and Georgian ecclesiastical architecture hereabouts. Close by is a large house, symmetrically built, with a porch of Greek marble and other signs of former display. But all within has been gutted and burnt: the long range of stone windows opens into emptiness, the roof has fallen in, and the marble columns are stained and split with fire. Here, too, in the same strange contrast of life and death, a beautiful garden, where the mixture of cypress and roses, of flowering trees and deep leafy shrubbery, betokens Turkish taste, forms a sideground and a background to the dismantled dwelling. Some elms and a few Cossack-tenanted huts complete the outer circle of the Meidan. Each one of these objects has a history, each one is a foot-print in the march of the Caucasian Nemesis, each one a record of her triumph and of her justice. The ruined mosque and turban-crowned tomb-posts recall the time when Mahometanism and submission to the great centre of orthodox Islam, Constantinople, was the official condition of Abkhasia. This passed into Russian rule and Christian lordship; and the Nemesis of this phase is marked by the wooden crosses under which lie the mutilated corpses of Colonel Cognard, Russian Governor-General of Abkhasia, of Ismailoff, Russian "Natchalnick" of So'ouk-Soo, of Cheripoff, the Tiflis Commissioner, and of Colonel Cognard's aide-de-camp: they perished in the outbreak of August. The large burnt house close by was the abode of Alexander Shervashiji, brother of the last native chief of Abkhasia. Less than half a century since the family bartered national independence and Islam against Russian popes and epaulettes. Their Nemesis has come too. In this very house Cognard and his suite were slaughtered. The ruin close by was once the residence of the ill-famed "Natchalnick" Ismailoff; it recalls the special vengeance of licentious tyranny-how, we shall seo afterwards. The church, alone yet intact, is of old date and of Georgian construction-once abandoned, then revived and repaired by the renegade Shervashijis, its Nemesis is now in its lonely silence. The ruin of hewn stone, Turkish in style, was the palace of Michael Shervashiji, the last native-born ruler of the province. Russian in uniform, Abkhasian at heart, rue to his own interests, false to those of others, he constructed this palace on his return from a visit to the west: it inaugurated the beginning cf a late return to the old Ottoman alliance; but with the general fate of return movements-especially when undertaken after their time—it inaugurated also his own ruin and that of his nation. The Cossack and Abkhasian huts further on were yet tenanted in November last: they are now empty. We alighted, visited these strange memorials one by one, heard the story of each, remounted our horses, galloped up and down the springy turf of the Meidan, and then plunged into the deep wooded ravine northcast, and left the scene of inconstancy, violence, and blood, on our way to the districts of Bzibb and northern Abkhasia. But our readers must halt a little longer on the Meidan if they de ir to understand the full import of the tragedy of which we have just seen the stage decorations. Of the early history of the Abkhasian race little is known, and little was probably to be known. More than two thousand years since we find them, in Greek records, inhabiting the narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, along the central eastern coast of the Euxine, precisely where later records and the maps of our own day place them. But whence these seeming autochthons arrived, what was the cradle of their infant race, to which of the great "earth-families," in German phrase, this little tribe, the highest number of which can never have much exceeded a hundred thousand, belonged, are questions on which the past and the present are alike silent. Tall stature, fair complexion, light eyes, auburn hair, and a great love for active and athletic sport, might seem to assign them a Northern origin; but an Oriental regularity of feature, and a language which, though it bears no discoverable affinity to any known dialect, has yet the Semitic post-fixes, and in guttural richness distances the purest Arabic or Hebrew, would appear to claim for them a different relationship. Their character, too, brave, enterprising, and commercial in its way, has yet very generally a certain mixture of childish cunning, and a total deficiency of organising power, that cement of nations, which removes them from European and even from Turkish resemblance, while it recalls the so-called Semitic of south-western Asia. But no tradition on their part lays claim to the solution of their mystery, and records are wanting among a people who have never committed their vocal sounds to writing; they know that they are Abkhasians, and nothing more. Pagans, like all early nations, they received a slight whitewash of Christianity at times from the Byzantine Empire, at times from their Georgian neighbours; till at last the downfall of Trebizond and the extension of the Ottoman power on their frontier by sea and by land rendered them what they have still mostly remained, Mahometans. Divided from time immemorial into five main tribes, each with its clannish subdivisions, the un-euphonic names of which we pass over out of sheer compassion to printers and readers, they first, at the beginning of the |