for the village away from the road. Seeing this, Satar Khan rode straight at the village. Rahim Khan from his main position in East Alvar immediately opened fire, and the high embanked road-which was built by the Russians to carry a railway-was swept with bullets. Dropping down to the further side of the embankment he held on under its cover, followed by precisely 17 men, the rest of the 500 staying at a safe distance. Three were killed in the last 400 yards, and there arrived in Alvar just 14 men, of whom three were wounded. I also reached the village, but at that time I was a non-combatant, as it was not till the end of March that I joined the fighting force. Later, some 80 men, leaving their horses in the rear, approached close up, and posting themselves along the embankment, which served as a sangar, returned the fire of West Alvar. The little force in East Alvar drove out the remaining Royalists, and held the village fourteen hours. The firing ceased, as usual, at nightfall, and in the dark Satar Khan returned safely to Tabriz. When it was suggested to him that his party might easily be annihilated, and that as his followers had already left the road he ought certainly to find himself cut off, he replied with

a

certainty which proved justified, "They will never think of that. It isn't the custom here to fight after sundown." The general lack of courage made the achievements of a few more noteworthy, and it was at Alvar that I saw one of those unsatisfying things which are so much more common in fighting than the fine successful things; I mean something which came very near being fine and successful, but failed. A horseman undertook to carry the Constitutionalist flag into Alvar, that the little force inside might hoist it, a perhaps unnecessary performance, but one which appeals to the theatrical instinct of the East. With the flag

shooting upright from the pommel of his saddle and its folds flying out behind him in the breeze, he galloped at a furious pace full in view of the enemy along the hard highway. A perfect blizzard of bullets flew around him. The flag was riddled, and I looked to see him fall or plunge to the cover of the bank. Still he held on faster and faster; two, three, and 400 yards were passed, and it seemed as though he might reach Alvar. But at a distance of 150 yards from the village, where the most advanced post of those who had failed to come in was firing on the enemy, the cavalier stopped his course and joined them. He had one flesh wound, and had made a fine ride, but not to a finish. The flag never reached Alvar.

The Royalist camp at Barinch lay in a valley before the village, and between it and Tabriz the hills made a horseshoe, the sides of which pointed towards the city. The slopes were open but steep, and often twisted into folds and gullies. Along the range of hills that formed the curve of the shoe the besiegers set their sangars and guns. At one time also they ran down the right arm, but they lost so many men in this position that they quickly abandoned it. Bakir Khan, who had entire command of the defence on that side chiefly because of the accident that his house was situated in the Khiavan quarter, whereas Satar Khan lived in Amrakiz near the Aji Chai bridge and the Julfa road, thereupon proceeded to turn this right arm into a Constitutionalist sangar. Along the top.of the steep and narrow ridge a winding trench was dug, which ran for a quarter of a mile and came to an abrupt stop some 200 yards from a precipitous hill which formed the turning point of the curve and a principal outpost of the enemy. On March 24th, Tabriz mustered something like 2,000 men for an attack on Barinch. It

was a picturesque and wonderful crowd, Seyds and Mollahs, Mujtehids and venerable members of the Anjuman, with wide flowing robes and turbans, green, blue, or white, according to their holy privilege. Two guns thundered fitfully and ineffectually well in the rear, and were never once advanced during the day. Round these a vast concourse of unarmed citizens and loiterers gathered, and at frequent intervals rent the skies with the piercing cry, "Yah Ali, Yah Ali," chanted by all in unison, in the twofold hope of frightening the enemy by much noise and convincing them that the besiegers were not Babis, as slanderously reported, but good Mussulmans like themselves. Here, as everywhere, the samovars were kept ever going, and tea, with Turkish delight and other sweetmeats, was peddled to a patient crowd, which was famishing for lack of bread. Once the unexpected happened and a shell fell into the supposed security, killing three non-combatants on the spot as well as wounding several and producing a hurried change of place. The gun is an extraordinary fetish in Persia. To lose men, or horses, or rifles is bad, but to allow a gun to fall into the enemy's hands is disgrace. Therefore the gun must be kept well in the rear, so that however hasty the flight of those in front it shall not be endangered. It must never be advanced on the pretext of any success in front. It must, in fact, be in general a quite useless source of anxiety and pride, comparable only to the "parlor" of the English artisan, a family glory displayed at funerals and feasts.

The centre of the horseshoe was left alone. A handful of about 40 men occupied all day a position on the right, that is on the left arm of the shoe, which opened towards the town. Outside the right arm, in the deep valley between it and the red hills of the

LIVING AGE. VOL. XLIV. 2327

north, Satar Khan, with 300 horsemen, was posted to prevent the main force being outflanked. This main force occupied the trenches on the right arm, and from dawn till dark fired rounds innumerable at the barricades along the curve. The trenches were full, but the majority of those in front showed no inclination to move forward, nor was any pressure noticeable from behind. When I reached the end of the trench I found that some 60 had pressed on another 100 yards, and, huddled together in such cover as the hill afforded, were threatening the enemy's strong barricade on the top. Further still a party of 21 had reached a pit half-way up and were not more than 40 yards from the goal. I reached this advance party about noon, and found that it consisted of 14 Persians and seven Caucasians, while in addition two Persians had already been killed and one wounded, and one Caucasian had been wounded. For an hour and a half we remained in this position, losing two more men. Not a man from the large force in the trenches joined us. One by one, a few, perhaps a dozen, ran the gauntlet as far as the second advance party at the foot of the hill, but none came further, nor did this group advance. From a position in the middle of the trench the Armenians fired bombs over our heads, dropping them behind the sangar above us. At half-past one, in the middle of a more furious bombardment than usual, the little party rushed the hill, the enemy bolted precipitately to a second line of barricades at a distance of 300 yards, and amidst ecstatic and ear-splitting yells of "Yah Ali," and a fusilade from everybody that sounded as if nothing ought to be left alive we found ourselves in possession of the sangar. Five more men had been hit, leaving 14 untouched out of the original 24. Vigorous yells and signals to the party behind now produced some

effect, and we were reinforced by some 50 men. There we stuck till sundown. Furious firing lasted all the time, and the bombs flew over our heads. The main body remained far behind in the trenches. Had it only come on, victory was easy and the siege might have been raised. Six more of the advance party were hit. A Georgian just in front of me in the rush to the hill blew his own head to pieces with a hand-grenade as he was about to throw it at the flying enemy, and I narrowly escaped a drenching as all the blood gushed out from his body toppling backwards. These were brave men; but it was odd that even the most cowardly took death and wounds with stoic indifference when they came. They were not ready to die and they took pains to live, but when the bullet came neither the victim nor those around him bemoaned the misfortune; a degenerate kind of fatalism. At sunset everybody retired on both sides. No one stayed to guard the hard-won hill, and next day this strong point of vital importance was quietly reoccupied by the Royalists and doubly fortified.

Karamelik, on the south side of Tabriz, was surrounded by a maze of rectangular gardens with the familiar brown, dead straight, clay walls which lend monotony to Persian towns as a foil to the varying colors of the bazaars. These walls formed ideal natural barricades, as the bullets spun harmlessly into the clay, while it was a simple matter at a moment's notice to piece it for loop-holes or break a passage-way. The ordinary form of fighting on this side consisted in each party posting itself behind a loopholed wall and blazing indiscriminately at The Contemporary Review.

the opposite wall. Safely ensconced behind one of these walls, one could hear the incessant thud of hundreds of bullets on the other side, at a distance of two feet from one's body, with the comfortable feeling of comparative security. Some warriors simply rested the muzzles of their rifles on the top and fired vaguely in the air. Others shoved them through loopholes and pulled the trigger, keeping their persons as far away from the opening as possible to avoid any risks. Occasionally some one got hit by a bullet passing through a hole, or if with greater daring he showed himself at one of the openings in order to reconnoitre the enemy; while the ceaseless flight of bullets that sung incessantly just overhead, passing above the seven-foot walls, naturally found some human billets further back as men came and went. I had seen this ineffectual performance often, and since of all the quarters it was the one in which the attacking party was most prone to stick fast and most difficult to persuade to advance, it was, therefore, a pleasure to find in the last sortie, on April 20th, which was the most desperate encounter of the siege, that, though few, there were some who had learnt their lesson and were willing to advance in rushes against an enemy whom such tactics were bound to affright. Till then, their opponents had only advanced to a new position, when the Kurds had first abandoned it as untenable. But on April 20th they were five times driven backwards and fled precipitately across the open. Their casualties were, probably, over 100. Ours were 24 out of possibly 150 men.

W. A. Moore.

If the story that was current when I first visited Auckland is true, it was indeed an ill wind for Australia that brought about the wandering of the little green stranger, the Tauhou or Blight-bird, across the Tasman Sea; but, as events have proved, it blew much good to New Zealand.

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The summer of 1850-51 was exceptionally hot and dry all over Southern Australia. By the end of January there was scarcely a patch of green grass to be found in Victoria: from the River Murray to Bass Straits the herbage was dry and brown; the eucalyptus forests were charged with resinous matter baked to the verge of conflagration. Then came the North wind, and with it sprang up the fires of Black Thursday, February 6, 1851. There have been terrible bush fires in Victoria since, but no day quite like that. Black smoke-clouds covered the Colony from end to end with a pall denser than that of a total eclipse. In Melbourne, where at eleven o'clock the thermometer stood at 117° in the shade, the citizens feared some mysterious convulsion of nature. Evening brought to the city the first news of the disaster that had fallen on the bush settlements and homesteads, but not for many days was its full extent known.

By that time the wind had changed, and the strong westerly that in Victoria almost always follows upon two or three days of hot wind had blurred the eastern coast-line with smoke, and rolled vast clouds of it, laden with acrid incense from ruined gullies of musk and sassafras, far out over the Tasman Sea towards New Zealand.

With that smoke, so tradition goes, went the Tauhou. It may have been that the little flock of birds was whirled up and away from the black

wood-lined margin of some stream in the ranges, as the tempest drove the flame-tongues through the tops of the tall gums. It may have been from its every breeding-haunts in the sanddunes of the coast that it was caught and hurried seawards by that fierce and blinding wind. That would be as impossible to ascertain as the origin of the fire, whereof no one knows. But one may imagine that as the smokewreaths drifted out and thinned in the salt air over the Pacific, and the tiny birds could once more look about them, they were very, very far from home, and had instinct led them to return those feeble wings could hardly have battled against the gale. They could but hurry helplessly eastwards over the waters, and doubtless many a fleck of still more vivid green had fallen in the green sea-surge before the great hills of Southland loomed up in their path.

A lonely shepherd, looking out at evening from a sea-washed promontory of the South Island, saw in the west, so the legend has it, a tiny cloud that. rising and falling in the light of sunset, grew ever larger as it came nearer, till presently it lighted close beneath him, and the manuka thickets were filled with the faint pipings of the stranger birds.

Such is the popular account of the coming of the Blight-bird (Zosterops cærulescens) to New Zealand, and one would like to believe it if only for the sake of its picturesqueness. High authority, however, has declared that the bird is indigenous to the wild places of the South Island. There is, indeed, evidence both ways. A very distinguished Maori chief, Paitu by name. once said that he noticed Tauhou birds near Milford Sound as long ago as 1832, in flocks of from thirty to forty.

The Maori does not usually make mistakes in matter of bushcraft. And it is noted that the birds' movements in New Zealand have always been from south to north, which is said to be inconsistent with a place of origin in the west. But that is only remarkable on the supposition that any journey from Australia must have been voluntary.

On the other hand, it may well have been that the traditional arrival was not the first of its kind, so that Paitu's birds may have been an earlier band of emigrants, or their descendants. And certain though it is that white men first saw the Blight-birds in New Zealand and in the Pitt and Chatham Islands very shortly after Black Thursday, it is quite likely there were also subsequent arrivals. One night, early in the 'fifties, dozens of the birds struck against the lighthouse on Dog Island, which lies in Foveaux Strait about seven miles east of the Bluff, at the extreme south of the South Island. The light-keeper who picked up their little bodies in the morning could not say definitely from which direction they had come, but thought that most likely it was from Stewart Island on the other side of the Strait-that is to say, from the south. That is of course quite possible. But it is strange that small land-birds should choose the night-time to migrate across such a narrow passage, nor does there seem to have been any previous record of the Blight-bird in Stewart Island. More likely these birds also had just arrived from Australia.

There is not much similarity between the bird-life of New Zealand and that of Australia. New Zealand, it is conceded by most modern naturalists, must be regarded as a separate biological province in itself, quite distinct from Australia, and indeed from every other region of the earth. There is, if aquatic and semi-aquatic species

be excluded, only one bird which is now strictly speaking endemic both in New Zealand and Australia, and that is the little bird which is the subject of this article. There is no difference between specimens from the two localities. The late John Gould is indeed said to have been able at once to pick out New Zealand from Australian specimens in the same cabinet, but subsequent ornithologists have not been able to verify his distinctions. It is a remarkable thing, when one considers that the genus Zosterops numbers eighty-eight species, spread over most of Africa and the East, besides Australia, that there should be no appreciable specific difference between the New Zealand form and that found in the part of Australia which is nearest to New Zealand, unless, as I believe is the case the former is a quite recent immigrant, involuntary it may well be, from the continent.

Other Australian species have from time to time found their way across the Tasman Sea. The Wattle-bird, which like the Blight-bird is a honeyeater, though a much larger one, and the Australian Roller or Dollar-bird, have occasionally been seen in New Zealand. Once swallows appeared in the North Island, and there have been sporadic occurrences of a continental Swift. The distance as the crow flies may be reckoned as 1000 miles. It would take the average small bird, carried by the heavy westerly winds that prevail in the Tasman Sea, at most three days to cross, so that the wonder rather is that there have not been more frequent occurrences of Australian birds in New Zealand.

Why is it that no other Australian visitant has established itself? I think the answer lies in this, that of Australian birds that have crossed to New Zealand the Blight-bird is the only one whose habits are gregarious. It is,