bodes of all the virtues and graces. The Hungarians
could not afford to throw stones at the Servians on the score of
morality, and the Roumanians certainly would not venture to try the
experiment. In the interior of Servia the population is pure, and the
patriarchal manner in which the people live tends to preserve them so.
There is as much difference between the sentiment in Belgrade and that
in the provinces as would be found between Paris and a French rural
district.

But let us drop details concerning Servia, for the brave little country
demands more serious attention than can be given to it in one or two
brief articles. The boat which bears me away from the Servian capital
has come hither from Semlin, the Austrian town on the other side of the
Sava River. It is a jaunty and comfortable craft, as befits such vessels
as afford Servians their only means of communication with the outer
world. If any but Turks had been squatted in Bosnia there would have
been many a smart little steamer running down the Sava and around up the
Danube; but the baleful Mussulman has checked all enterprise wherever he
has had any foothold. We go slowly, cleaving the dull-colored tide,
gazing, as we sit enthroned in easy-chairs on the upper deck, out upon
the few public institutions of Belgrade--the military college and the
handsome road leading to the garden of Topschidere, where the
Lilliputian court has its tiny summer residence. Sombre memories
overhang this "Cannoneer's Valley," this Topschidere, where Michael, the
son and successor of good Milosch as sovereign prince of the nation,
perished by assassination in 1868. In a few minutes we are whisked round
a corner, and a high wooded bluff conceals the White City from our view.

The Servian women--and more especially those belonging to the lower
classes--have a majesty and dignity which are very imposing. One is
inclined at first to believe these are partially due to assumption, but
he speedily discovers that such is not the case. Blanqui, the French
revolutionist, who made a tour through Servia in 1840, has given the
world a curious and interesting account of the conversations which he
held with Servian women on the subject of the oppression from which the
nation was suffering. Everywhere among the common people he found virile
sentiments expressed by the women, and the princess Lionbitza, he said,
was "the prey of a kind of holy fever." M. Blanqui described her as a
woman fifty years o