For quite a considerable time I used to call day by day at the Ottoman Bank to ask if remittances had arrived, and so long as my funds lasted I used to bombard that recalcitrant Yankee colonel with telegrams insisting on the fulfilment of his contract. He took no notice of my messages, and in a very little while things began to look desperate. It was a great thing to be on the spot, however, and after some three weeks of fruitless anger and bitter anxiety I found casual work to do under a gentleman who had constituted himself the agent of an old-fashioned London weekly. I wrote an article for this journal, entitled 'In a State of Siege,' got money down for it, and lived carefully on it for some ten days. At the end of that time, I was strolling rather disconsolately round the Concordia Gardens at night-time, when I came upon a group of men with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. They were seated round a little table, drinking vishnap and lemonade, and chattering gaily amongst themselves. One of them called me to join the party, and another, whom I knew to be acting as agent for the _Scotsman_, was reading a newspaper. We talked indifferently for a while; and the reader, laying down his journal on the table, set his hand upon it with a solid emphasis and said, 'If I could find the man who wrote that article, I should ask him to go to the front at once.'
I glanced at the open sheet, and, lo! the article was mine. I said so, and in ten minutes I had made a bargain. I was to go up country at the earliest possible moment; and received instructions as to how to proceed in application for the necessary _teskerai_, a form of passport or safeguard without which no stranger was allowed to enter the interior. The search after that abominable _testerai_ delayed me for many days, and I danced attendance on Said Pasha (English Said as he was called) until I was weary and heartsick.
At last I determined to go without the passport, and did so; but the delay I experienced brought me into contact with as queer a body of adventurers as I ever encountered in my life. At the head of these gentlemen was a Mr. Montague Edie, or Edie Montague (for he wrote the name both ways)--a young fellow of apparently four or five and twenty, who gave himself out, I think, as a lieutenant in the English navy, and who professed to have authority from the Turkish Government to sail a war-ship under letters of marque and to harry Russian commerce in the Black Sea.