ntenegro
is interested in ages. They were astounded at ours. They said that Jo
would have been seventeen if she were Serbian; and one rose, shook Jan
warmly by the hand and said he must have "navigated" the marriage well.

We rode over the frontier, but we were not yet in the real Montenegro.
This is not the black mountain where the last dregs of old Serbian
aristocracy defied the Turk, this is still the Sanjak, three years ago
Turkish, and with pleasant pasturages spreading on either hand.

At last we came up over Plevlie. To one corner we could see the town
creeping in a crescent about the foot of a grey hill, far away on the
other side was a little monastery, forlorn and white, like a shivering
saint, and between a great valley with four purplish humps in the midst
of the corn and maize fields, like great whales bursting through a
patchwork quilt.

Our horses were thoroughly cheered up, and we passed through the long
streets of the town at a lively trot, a thing Jo was taught as a child
to consider bad form.

A semi-transparent little man in a black hat stood on the hotel steps
beckoning to us. But we had no use for hotel touts, and waved our sticks
saying, "Hospital." He seemed curiously disappointed.

The hospital, many long low buildings, lay buried in a park of trees.
The staff lived in a tiny house near by, where we were welcomed by the
cook, Mrs. Roworth. She explained that as the house was hardly capable
of holding its ten or twelve occupants, a room had been taken for us at
the inn, but that we were to meal with them.

"Not that you will like the food," she said, "for it's all tinned, and I
have only twenty-five shillings a week to buy milk, bread, and fresh
meat."

We wondered why, in such a fertile country, a party of hard-working
people should be condemned to eat tinned mackerel and vegetables brought
all the way from England?

However, the dinner was excellent--all "disguised," she said, for she
had during the few weeks she had been there concentrated on the art of
disguising bully beef and worse problems, and had sternly put Dr. Clemow
on omelets and beefsteaks, as his digestion had caved in under six
months' unadulterated tinned food.

We met old friends, fellow travellers on the way out. In those days they
were a wistful little party, wondering how they were going to reach
Montenegro, the Adriatic being impossible. At last one of the passes was
hurriedly improved for them by a thousand priso