performed his military service at Zaje[vc]a,
where he married--so one of his sisters told me--one Mileva, the
daughter of Yovan Stan[vc]evi['c], a merchant. After his marriage he
went to Jena, in order to continue his studies, and there he became a
Doctor of Letters. It may be that while he was at Jena he became
conscious of the regime of violence to which the Roumanians in Serbia
are subjected; at any rate he decided not to return to that country,
where his wife and three sisters are well satisfied to live. He launched
himself into a furious anti-Serbian propaganda in favour of those who,
in the words of Dr. Draghicesco, are profoundly sad and full of grief at
being neither Serbian nor Roumanian, who when they meet a Roumanian
brother listen to him with pleasure and, with their eyes full of tears,
murmur: "How happy we should be to be with you." ... When I travelled
through those parts with a view to verifying Dr. Athanasius's
assertions, I was invariably told by persons of Roumanian origin that
they had no complaint whatever against the Serbs, and that the last
thing they desired was to be politically united to the Roumanians of the
kingdom. Dr. Athanasius might reply that his wretched compatriots were
impelled by fear to give such answers. But what do they fear?--one finds
that among these people are deputies, priests, army officers and so
forth. "To-day," says Dr. Athanasius, "all the peoples who are reduced
to slavery by other people secure the right to return to their
fatherland." The Roumanians of Serbia would have to be a good deal more
miserable before wishing to have anything to do with Roumania. Milan
Soldatovi['c], ex-mayor of the great mining village of Bor and himself
of Roumanian origin, said that he had never heard of any one who went to
work in Roumania. No doubt the present generation of Roumanian
landowners deeply deplore the misdeeds of their ancestors, who drove the
ancestors of these peasants away from Roumania. "The peasant hovels were
merely dark burrows, called _bordei_, holes dug in the ground and
roofed with poles covered with earth, rising scarcely above the level of
the plain.... The interior was indescribable. Neither furniture nor
utensils, with the exception of the boards which served as beds or seats
and the pot for cooking the _mamaliga_"[113]--his sole food, a paste
consisting of maize meal cooked in water. And one cannot be astonished
if the Roumanians in Serbia are chary of believing