ble Bulgars appear to have recognized that these activities of
some Serbian officers and others need certainly not embroil the two
people; while some other manifestations of joy, such as when they
pulled out the beard of the priest of Pirot, and after nightfall, in
celebration of this triumph, illuminated the town, those and similar
transactions were treated as the folly of exuberant subalterns; and
Tako Peyeff of Trn, the spokesman of the little, far-away town and
its representative at San Stefano, told me that although he refused to
sign petitions, yet he said that if Prince Milan should visit Trn it
was the duty of all men to salute him. Up to this time, then, there
was no veritable friction--there was only the cloud gathering over
Macedonia; and even when the Berlin Congress of 1879 adjudged certain
towns to Serbia, as a recompense for the abandonment of any claims on
Bosnia, this was rightly taken by most Bulgars as being far less the
fault of Serbia than of Austria and the other Powers. It is strange,
in fact, that this difficult passage in Serbia's history was marked by
greater animus between Serb and Croat than between Serb and
Bulgar--and the Serbs were standing in Bulgaria. Milan had not yet
made his ill-omened remark that the road to Sarajevo went _via_ Sofia.

THE DEPLORABLE MILAN

One of the direst misfortunes that ever came upon Serbia was Milan,
her fickle, headstrong, extravagant ruler. He was, perhaps, no Serb at
all; it had been given out, when he came as a child from Roumania,
that he was the grandson of the younger brother of Milo[vs], but this
statement was not universally accepted--he lived under the suspicion
of being an illegitimate son of the Roumanian Prince--and at his first
appearance before the Skup[vs]tina a certain Ranko Tajsi['c], a
deputy, refused to rise. "I want that man's birth certificate!" he
shouted. It is not surprising that Milan did his best to make, from
that time onwards, Ranko's life a burden. If the Prince had been a
more satisfactory monarch, his origin would have mattered little. Many
of his attributes seem to his detractors to be peculiarly Roumanian,
although it is true that extravagance is not unknown in Serbia, and
this was the foible which his subjects, even when they learned the
colossal amount of his debts, were most willing to overlook. It was
only after his death that the secret treaty of alliance between
himself and his paymasters, the Austro-Hungarian Governm