CONCLUSION 329 



which was very rapid, by clapping their hands to the 

 music. Of this last I will say discreetly little ! In 

 this land of the balalaika there was too little balalaika, 

 and too much of the earliest known " science of 

 harmonical sounds." 



Wherever you go, theatres, dances, concerts, you 

 meet Armenians. They are concentrating on Tiflis — 

 will they absorb it ? They have their own newspapers, 

 and pull the strings of more than one Russian " organ." 

 I never saw such a place for newspapers, it rivals 

 London. And all, from what I could gather from 

 expurgated translations, run on the generous lines of 

 our English Sunday eye-openers, who always have 

 more murders and suicides on hand than can be 

 credibly accounted for during the week — even if ac- 

 counts were demanded. Sufficient for the Sunday is 

 the " news " thereof. 



When we were asked, as usually happened two or 

 three times of an evening, what we most admired in 

 Tiflis, we always said very diplomatically, " The 

 Georgian ladies," because if a woman of any other 

 nationality didn't say that, everyone would refer to 

 those grapes which never ripen. Requested to mention 

 what struck us as the city's greatest requirement, we 

 invariably prescribed a destructor. If the place 

 possesses one it must be perennially out of order, or 

 why such hopeless heaps of rotting rubbish lying in the 

 waste places of the town ? 



There are hardly any Britishers in Tiflis ; I met 

 none who permanently reside there. We were told of 

 one who had set up a shop of sorts near the Maidan, 

 Y 2 



