peatedly in my travels I would come at nightfall to some little
vedette outpost and be made welcome of the officers' Mess. That meant
sharing their meal, whatever it was,--a very poor one sometimes. After
the main dish I would bring out dates and biscuits, of which I had a
small store, to find usually that the Bulgarian officers would refuse to
trench upon my supplies, as I was going forward "to the front" and
would need them. That was not the attitude of savages but of gentlemen.

These and a score of similar incidents showed me the Bulgarian national
character as kind, honest, patient, courageous. They made it impossible
for me to believe that by nature these people are invariably cruel,
rapacious, murderous. That in cases of Balkan massacres and outrages the
Bulgarian people have not been always the victims, and have not been
always blameless, I know. It is impossible to shut one's eyes to the
fact that something survives of the traditions of cruelty and reprisal
existing in the Balkans of the Middle Ages. In this Balkan peninsula
there is always a smell of blood in the nostrils, a mist of blood in the
eyes. The Bulgarians have taken their part in many incidents which seem
to deny the existence of Christian civilisation.

[Illustration: THE RATCHENITZA, THE NATIONAL DANCE OF BULGARIA]

But I speak of the people as I found them, and I came away from the
Balkans confident that my life and property would always be safe with
Bulgarian peasants, provided that I made no movement to begin trouble. I
came away, too, with a high idea of their essential soundness as a
nation and their certainty of a great future. Allowances have to be made
for the hostility of circumstances. As is insisted by the Bulgarians,
when the little nation started to restore its old home life, everything
had to be replaced. "It was not only the political conditions which had
altered, but social life itself. At a moment's notice, and practically
out of nothing, a new administration had to be organised and the diverse
organs of the national life to be improvised. Hardly anything valuable
of the preceding regime could be utilised. In this connection, it is
interesting to observe the different fortunes of a conquered province.
When a province which had formed part of a civilised country passes to a
nation equally civilised, one may say that in many respects the change
is an unimportant one, because in such a case the conqueror retains
almost all the insti