or of his hut, if a policeman is sitting
waiting till it is done. Nor can you live with a family and see its
habits. Just as I had plodded round Serbia in spite of the police,
so I would not be put off Bosnia, but to this day I regret the great
amount of most interesting material that was there at my hand and
which I could not gather. Bosnia was a mine of old-world lore and
belief. As in Serbia, however, it was obvious that there was
something the authorities wanted to conceal. And as "DORA" had not
yet been born in England the affair seemed to me unutterably silly
and tiresome. The first part of the journey I was, for all practical
purposes, under arrest. Met on arrival everywhere by a most polite
young official, who told me his whole time was at my disposal. "This
is a mosque," he said, "this is a Turkish coffee-house. We will have
a cup of coffee. This is the Catholic Church, or Orthodox, as the
case might be." We inspected the school, and took a walk in the
environs. "Now you have seen all. I will go with you to the post
office and get a place for you on the diligence to-morrow. It starts
at eight." The evening was spent in the hotel where all the Beamters
had their meals. I tried to get information about local customs.
Sometimes my hosts supplied them. More often the topic bored them.
We talked of Vienna and London. After a good deal of this I
reflected I was losing time and money. Every one was politeness and
kindness itself. But I missed the long evenings in Albanian or
Montenegrin huts round the fire; the talk and the doings. The
Austrian official who sighed only for the Opera or the Ringstrasse
and thought himself an exile wearied me. But as I was not allowed to
study the native I had to study him. I startled some of them one
night when they asked me as usual, how I liked Bosnia, by telling
them that so far I had seen none of it, nothing but the Austrian
occupation. This sort of thing went on a bit longer. Then on the
Herzegovinian frontier I accidentally picked up an official to whom
I had no letter of introduction. A cheery, enterprising individual
who said he did not know to which of the many races of the Empire he
belonged--and did not care. Was a geologist and a bit of an
antiquarian. Took me up an 8,000 foot mountain and incidentally
almost killed me. For on the desolate summit we surprised a chamois
at close quarters, which snuffed us, gathered its feet and jumped
over what looked like a precipice, thoug