e corner
was the old pink palace, now used as a riding school. It had been the
first place in Montenegro to possess a billiard-table. So,
billiard-tables being rarer and more curious than kings--the palace had
been called the BILLIADO.

The Queen, whatever agility she may have possessed once when navigating
banisters, is now a sedate and domestic person, and doesn't hold with
bluestockings, notwithstanding the "Higher Education" of some of her
daughters.

The story goes that once when the King was away she inaugurated one of
those thorough-paced spring cleanings dear to most women's hearts;
ordered the dining-room furniture into the street, and superintended the
beating of it. Women hold a poor position in Montenegro, but one of
character can carry all before her. A well-known English nurse was
managing a hospital in Cettinje during the first Balkan War. One of her
patients, though well connected as peasants often are in Montenegro, was
a drunken old reprobate, and she told the authorities he must go. They
demurred--his relations must not be offended. She insisted. They did
nothing. One morning they found him, bed and all, in the middle of the
street opposite the King's palace.

The authorities swallowed their lesson.

In the evening we walked over the stony hills with our host, and first
had a glimpse of the real character of the country which had for so long
kept the Turks at bay. One realized how much the people owed to the land
for their boasted independence. Barren rock and scrub oak, no army could
live here in sufficient numbers to subdue even a semi-warlike nation.
Cettinje has been burned many a time by the Moslem, but starvation
eventually drove him back to the fatter plains of the Sanjak, leaving a
profitless victory behind him. Napoleon and Moscow over again.

More miners from America passed with their showy machine-woven clothes,
accompanied by their wives, who had evidently stayed behind in the old
country. Otherwise they would have picked up new-fangled ideas about the
rights of women, and would certainly have refused to shoulder the
enormous American suit cases while their men ambled carelessly in front.

The next day we had a further interview with the War Minister, who
introduced to us a man in corduroys, the only really round-faced person
we had met in Montenegro. Part of his name was "Ob," so as we forgot the
rest of it we called him Dr. Ob. He was the minister of drains, and such
things. As no