pen country, which is why they
are a hardy and long-lived race.

But the new palace seemed to him a fine building, and he was lucky
enough to see old King Peter, with his white hair and his fine, sturdy
face, drive out of the grounds. A crowd had assembled, knowing that he
was going to drive out, and it cheered the old man to the echo. Dick
remembered how, for many years, King Peter had lived in Paris alone, in
poverty, longing always for the time when he might return to the land
his ancestors had helped to free from Turkish tyranny. And now this old
man was an idolized king, who had led his people in two victorious wars
and to-day was being urged by them to defy a country many times the size
of his own. Dick took off his own hat and cheered with the crowd when
the carriage passed him.

"I'm not a Servian," he said, to himself, "but he's a real man, and it
won't hurt me to take off my hat to him, I guess."

Here in Belgrade there was far more excitement over the prospect of war
than there had been in Semlin. Dick decided that this was because here
much more of the truth was known.

He liked the looks of the newer part of Belgrade, beyond the palace.
Here there were pleasant white houses, in green gardens, and everything
was clean and well kept. The people, too, seemed to him more like real
folks, as he put it. There wasn't a servile respect for a uniform. One
reason for that, had he known it, was that when Servia went to war it
meant that every man, and every boy old enough to carry arms, was
engaged. It was a nation that fought, not just an army.

So it was with a pleasanter impression of the Servian capital than he
had expected to acquire that Dick returned to Semlin. When he got back
the sun was already low over the hills in the west, and he had just
about time to hurry to his lodgings and change his clothes.

There he found something that surprised and angered him. In his absence
someone had been through all his few belongings; few because he had of
necessity traveled with little baggage. He could see that everything had
been ransacked, and he guessed that the police had paid his room another
visit in his absence. It hadn't done them any good, for of course he
carried no papers that would have been of the slightest interest to
anyone else, and his money, the only valuable thing he had, was always
in the belt that he wore next to his skin, under all his clothes.

But he was angry, none the less, and he carried