outsider); he has been told that the Englishman is
grave, like himself, and therefore he appreciates him from afar. But not
many Englishmen (or Serbs) would care to indulge, like the Montenegrins,
in the ceaseless recapitulation of time-honoured exploits. The younger
folk are not so faithful to these ancient stories, but it is in
Montenegro that performers on the one-stringed, monotonous guslar can
most easily find an audience. The Serbs of the kingdom have become more
eclectic in musical matters, though even with them the popular taste is
in favour of the man who snores, on the grounds that he is hearty and
robust. In so far as foreign influence is concerned, the Montenegrin has
been to some extent affected by Italian culture, while that of Greece
and Germany has acted on the Serb. But the Great War had an equally
unfortunate influence on both of them. One must, however, mention that
long before the War, and owing partly to Albanian influence, partly to
their own struggle for existence and partly to other causes, the
Montenegrins had shown themselves defective in straightforwardness.
Undoubtedly they had deteriorated under the example of Nikita, but this
unfortunate trait can also be discerned between the lines of the great
poem, the "Gorski Venac," written in the first half of the nineteenth
century. There used to be a certain amount of what we call theft in
Montenegro, but the natives of that country, as of Albania, cherished
rather communistic ideas; it seemed to them that they had a sort of
right to that which another possessed, particularly if he was a near
relative. After the War the Montenegrin was so much impoverished that he
stole more freely, and the Serb, whose hands had hitherto been
remarkably clean, took to the same habits and often in a very amateur
fashion. Thus in a Macedonian village where a British army store had
been rifled, the officers turned to the local priest, who was indignant
with his people and conducted the officers into every house. Nothing was
discovered, and the priest proposed that his own house should be
searched. He was told that this was unnecessary, but he insisted; and
when his careless wife led the way up a ladder into the loft a British
officer perceived at any rate one pair of khaki breeches. The patients
of the Scottish Women's Hospital at Belgrade were so unpractised in the
art of stealing that one of them--a typical case--returned one day to
have her leg attended to, and in rai