from the window. If I had been there I
would have wept on her grave." She was but fifteen, and it was her
initiation into those Balkan politics in which, as Madame Rizoff,
she was herself later to play a part.

We shouted our last "Zhivio!" The play was over. Petar was King and
the Near East had entered upon a new path which led as yet none knew
whither.

I noted in my diary, "Will the army, now that it has taken the bit
between its teeth, be more than King Petar can manage?" In truth no
greater curse can befall a land than to be ruled by its own army. A
nation that chooses to be dictated to by its military has sunk low
indeed.

Cetinje showed signs of relapsing into dullness. I started on a tour
up country. The country I have described elsewhere, and will deal
now only with the political situation.

There were no roads then over the mountains and travelling was very
severe work. At every halt--for rest in the midday heat, or a cup of
black coffee to stimulate me for another two or three hours on horse
and on foot--the Serbian murders were the one topic. Boshko, my
guide, with the latest news from Podgoritza was in great request and
a proud man. Everywhere the crime was approved. The women raged
against Draga, even saying "She ought to lie under the accursed
stone heap!"--a reminiscence of the fact that stoning to death was
actually inflicted in Montenegro in the old days, upon women for
sexual immorality. Vuk Vrchevitch records a case as late as 1770.
And in quite recent times a husband still, if he thought fit, would
cut off the nose of his wife if he suspected her of infidelity. No
man, it was explained to me cheerfully, was ever likely to make love
to her again after that.

West Europe was, in 1903, quite ignorant of the state of primitive
savagery from which the South Slavs were but beginning to rise.
Distinguished scientists travelled far afield and recorded the head
hunters of New Guinea. But the ballads of Grand Voyvoda Mirko--King
Nikola of Montenegro's father--gloating over slaughter, telling of
the piles of severed heads, of the triumph with which they were
carried home on stakes and set around the village, and the best
reserved as an offering to Nikola himself for the adornment of
Cetinje; and the stripping and mutilating of the dead foe, give us a
vivid picture of life resembling rather that of Dahomey, than Europe
in 1860.

In the breast of every human being there is a wolf. It may sleep for
sev