When God shall bring full reckoning,
For our dead comrade's sake.

Ballad.

Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful
person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming.
It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly
of western peoples instead of the most westerly of easterns that
he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle. The
host never knows which side of his nature is going to turn up
next.

Dirkovitch was a Russian - a Russian of the Russians - who
appeared to get his bread by serving the Czar as an officer in a
Cossack regiment, and corresponding for a Russian newspaper with a
name that was never twice alike. He was a handsome young Oriental,
fond of wandering through unexplored portions of the earth, and he
arrived in India from nowhere in particular. At least no living
man could ascertain whether it was by way of Balkh, Badakshan,
Chitral, Beluchistan, or Nepaul, or anywhere else. The Indian
Government, being in an unusually affable mood, gave orders that
he was to be civilly treated and shown everything that was to be
seen. So he drifted, talking bad English and worse French, from
one city to another, till he foregathered with Her Majesty's White
Hussars in the city of Peshawur, which stands at the mouth of that
narrow swordcut in the hills that men call the Khyber Pass. He was
undoubtedly an officer, and he was decorated after the manner of
the Russians with little enamelled crosses, and he could talk, and
(though this has nothing to do with his merits) he had been given