mouths. It actually creates a new form of life, and one lovelier, more vigorous, than those from which it proceeded-for the hybed always has a stronger constitution than its parents. This is a merit of the process which its enemies grudgingly acknowledge. But the interest of hybridisation stretches far beyond the superficial points I have dealt with. It suggests grave considerations which can only be hinted in an article which I have tried to make chatty and 'popular.' Such abnormal unions of species and even genera-not only unnatural but impossible, according to the recognised laws-have proved fruitful, that the science of orchidology is threatened with revolution. If the public cared to listen I might go into that hazardous subject one day.

Meanwhile almost everyone who grows orchids, professional or amateur, is hybridising. On such a scale it is practised already that great dealers have reduced their importations of the natural species enormously, and one of them foresees the time when all the orchids he wants will be raised on the premises. To me that seems a pleasing fancy, though some of my friends regard it as an evil dream-as unsubstantial as other dreams, happily. There is much to be urged on either side, but it would be mostly technical; and my space is full.

FREDERICK BOYLE.

819

PLEVNA REVISITED

AND THE HAUNTED HOUSE AT THE vidbridge,

DECEMBER 10, being the twenty-eighth anniversary of the most famous and most heroic of modern battles, the last sortie from Plevna, will recall to the memory of readers the stupendous struggle of nearly six months' duration, the Siege of Plevna, which closed, grandy and tragically, in the lonely little house at the Vidbridge, at three o'clock in the afternoon of December 10, 1877.

The account of a recent revisit to the Bulgarian townlet by the historian of the 'Defence of Plevna,' Captain von Herbert, may therefore be deemed opportune, more particularly as one of the combatants, Russia, has recently been engaged in warfare with another stubborn foe, and the second, Turkey, has been preparing to measure strength with her neighbour and former vassal, Bulgaria, for the last two years.

Captain von Herbert not only is the historian of the defence of Plevna, but also was a participator in those stirring events, as a second lieutenant, then seventeen years old, in the Turkish infantry.

The younger generation cannot conceive the thrill which shook the whole newspaper-reading world when Osman Pasha thundered his imperious Thus far and no farther' against Russia's hosts from the green hills which surround the sleepy town; when attack after attack was repulsed, entailing losses in human life at which civilisation stood aghast (30,000 men, for instance, in the twenty-four hours of the third of the four great battles between noon of the 11th and noon of September 12); when the torrid summer heat changed to autumn storms, and the autumn storms to winter snows, and yet the lion of Plevna' held out with his 40,000 starving men and their seventy guns against a quarter of a million and their 800 guns; when, finally, the long drawn-out drama culminated in that intense tragedy known as the Last Sortie, which will live in the memory of mankind as long as history is written.

By an accident the writer stood outside the little house at the Vidbridge when that final tragedy was enacted within. Since then the house has acquired the reputation of being haunted. Twenty-seven years later he stood again before that deserted dwelling, and his impressions are recorded in the following pages.

I AM in Plevna once more, after an absence of twenty-seven years. This is classic ground. The soil is rich here, and well it might be so; for a hundred thousand warriors sleep their last sleep in the fields and the hills which surround the bright, pleasant little town; and over their bodies grow maize and wheat, and the vine which has made famous the name 'Pleven' (as the Bulgarians call the town; 'Plevna' is the Turkish version) all over the Balkan Peninsula.

A crawling train took me through the fertile plains to Plevna.

It appeared almost like a sacrilege to approach the historic town in a modern saloon car. All change here for Plevna' is nearly as bad as All tickets for Jerusalem' on the Syrian railway.

The moment you pass the picturesque village of Grivitza you see monuments to the fallen everywhere, from the large, pretentious chapel of the Roumanians on the summit of the Grivita heights, to the plain white obelisk erected by some Russian regiment. There are over 300 of these monuments in the immediate surroundings of Plevna. Some are erected on giant graves. The regiment Pensa lost, in the second of the four battles, 2,200 men out of 3,000 in an attack lasting twenty minutes, and one of the four inscriptions on the simple monument says: 'Sacred to the memory of the regiment Pensa, which lies buried here.' At Gorni Dubnik, on the southern high road, where a desperate fight occurred between a Turkish outwork and a Russian assailing column, a tentacle of the ever-growing investing octopus, one memorial crowns a gigantic grave of three thousand bodies.

The monuments are all consecrated to the dead Russians and the dead Roumanians, never to the dead Turks, who know not stone memorials, for their impecuniosity has uttered a peremptory veto, and there is also a religious objection to them. History is their indelible and supreme monument. To the Greek is wealth, to the Circassian beauty, to the Frank learning; but to the Osmanli is majesty,' says a Turkish proverb.

Here in Plevna one realises the glorious dignity of silence, as practised by the Turk. The credit of the most famous, of the most sublimely heroic campaign of modern times is his; yet he never mentions it, either in writing or in speaking, either publicly or privately; and his dead heroes rest in forgotten graves.

The Bulgarians talk glibly of war with Turkey. Those who reside in Plevna, or who have visited Plevna, are not quite so fluent or quite so loud. Turkey is silent, but Plevna lives and speaks for her, whose power of recuperation, whose latent might and majesty, whose blows, hard, swift, sure, and cruel, have filled all thinking men of Western civilisation with admiration, almost with awe, for five centuries past.

The town of Plevna is practically unchanged-that I maintain in spite of all that bragging Bulgarians led me to expect. A quarter of a century of national independence and European culture has passed by and left but the faintest traces. There are some new

buildings: the unpretending railway station, half-way between the town and the Vidbridge of immortal fame, with an open-air restaurant of a distinctly German type attached to it; a hospital, consisting of a number of detached white houses.; the barracks of two infantry regiments, most modern and most uncompromisingly ugly; a pretentious town hall, with a clock tower; a school of viticulture; a score or so of private houses in the ordinary villa style. But the crooked, narrow, ill-paved streets; the quaint, shady lanes between orchards and kitchen gardens; the small shops open to the winds of heaven; the tiny, one-storied Turkish houses, hidden discreetly in their leafy grounds; the Bulgarian dwellings, equally small, but a trifle more pretentious, abutting on the streets; the wretched hovels of the gipsies; the many buildings in desuetude and decay; the waste spaces full of evil-smelling rubbish; the six or seven massive mosques (only one of which is used as a mosque now); the old Greek Church; the pigstyes and fowl runs in the main thoroughfares; even the Turkish cafés chantant, modest and retiring: they are all here, remaining from the year of war. The very scavenger dogs are the same, of a breed unknown in England; and the Tultchenitza brook flows still right through the streets, and serves, now as before, as natural drain.

The Hôtel Evropa' is new, as hotel; but I fancy I recognise the house-once the workshop of a Turkish artificer in silver filigree, a craft which left Bulgaria when the Turks left it. They have simply added an upper story, and a wing in what was once the back garden. It is hardly an hotel in the European sense, merely a superficially glorified eastern khan. It is, however, the best of the town, and the people are extremely obliging. The sanitary arrangements are so primitive that it would be impossible for an Occidental lady to stay in the hotel.

Strangers, however, are not unknown in Plevna. Austrian and German commercial travellers, mostly Jews, are constantly coming and going, sometimes also French, Swiss, Belgian, Russian business men, but never English. Russian, Roumanian, Austrian, German, French officers come in small parties to study the battlefields and the old Turkish fortifications, which are piously preserved by the Bulgarian Government. American officers have also been here. Before the Macedonian rebellion, a batch of young Turkish officers came annually to undergo a systematic course in military history, tactics, and fortification, and the Bulgarians— all honour to them for this-always behaved with the utmost

courtesy and readiness towards their former enemies and oppressors. Three years ago, two Japanese officers created a sensation by paying a ceremonial visit, in full uniform, to the officer commanding the garrison. British officers never come this way. I was the first.

A visit to Plevna cannot be commended to the ordinary traveller with a small stock of linguistic knowledge. Nobody speaks English here. As in Roumania, British trade has left the country. Great Britain has not even a consul in Plevna, and I, a British subject and a British officer, had to apply to the Austrian Consul, when I required diplomatic assistance in a trifling matter. And, of course, the request which I would have addressed as a matter of right to a British agent, I had to solicit as a favour from the Austrian. It was readily granted, and red tape, the idol of the British official, did not appear to enter into the calculations of the courteous Viennese.

Besides the German, Austrian, Servian, Roumanian, and Russian Consuls, there are a dozen men in Plevna who speak a little broken French, and a dozen others who speak a little broken German. But everybody speaks Turkish, which language, in spite of all that has happened, is still the French of the Orient, as Arabic is its Latin. Since my knowledge of Bulgarian is trifling, Turkish was also my means of communication. Even in the post office French and German are not spoken: The officers speak Turkish, Roumanian, and Russian, but only a few French or German.

The latest census has given the numbers of inhabitants of Plevna at 18,709. Turks, previous to 1877, estimated its population at 17,000, exclusive of the gipsies, who had then, and have now, a separate quarter, and whom the Turks hardly consider as human beings. I remember the gipsy Mahallah of Plevna perfectly well, as it was in 1877, and it was then at least twice as large as it is now. That means, that the town had 5,000 gipsies, and a total population of 22,000 in 1877. Like all Bulgarian towns (excepting Sofia, Philippopolis, Varna, and Burgas) Plevna has become smaller since 1877.

It has a weekly cattle, grain, and vegetable market, and is considered the centre of the Bulgarian wine trade. At present two regiments of infantry (the 4th and the 11th) are stationed in the town. The latter has to its credit that which military experts consider the finest marching performance ever accomplished by