cklessly at every obstacle. The driver
was a stupid fellow, without an ounce of pluck in his composition, and
declared more than once that he would not go on, preferring to stop
under such shelter as the trees afforded. We were of another mind, and
insisted on his pushing on. One of us walked at the horses' heads, and
thus we splashed and blundered on for three mortal hours, wishing all
the time that we had slept at Milanovacz. The route became so much worse
that I declared we must have missed the track. We were apparently in a
deep gully, traversed by a mountain torrent hardly a foot below the
level of our road; but the Servian said he knew we were "all right," and
that we should come directly to a house where we could get shelter.

He had hardly spoken when H---- descried some lights not very far ahead,
and in less than ten minutes we came alongside a good-sized hut, which
turned out to be the welcome wine-shop the driver had promised us. Here
was a roof anyhow, so we entered, hoping for supper and beds in the
wayside inn. All our host could produce was a very good bottle of
Servian "black" wine and some coarse bread of the country, so stale
that we could hardly break it. This wine, which is almost as black as
ink, comes from Negotin, lower down the Danube, and is rather a
celebrated vintage I was informed.

It was only in my untravelled mind that the idea of "beds" existed at
all. H---- knew better than to expect anything of the kind. All we could
do was to examine the place we were in with reference to passing the
night. The floor of the room consisted of hard stamped clay, which from
the drippings of our garments had become damp and slightly adhesive to
the tread. The furniture consisted of a few rough stools and three
tables. There was no question of any other apartment, there being only a
dark hole in the rear sacred to the family, into which every sense we
possessed forbade us to intrude. In peering about with the candles we
found that the floor was perfectly alive with insects--such strange
forms, awful in their strangeness--interesting, I daresay, to the
entomologist, but simply disgusting to one not given to collecting
specimens.

If I were dying I could not have laid myself down on that floor, so we
dragged the three tables together. They were provokingly uneven, but
with the aid of a sheepskin _bunda_, and our carpet-bags for pillows,
we contrived something upon which to rest our tired limbs. I should
ob