[Illustration:  “MACGAHAN AND FRANK MILLET.”]

By this time, you may be wondering just where “Andreas” comes in.  Perhaps I have been over long in getting to my specific subject; but I will not be discursive any more.  It was at the table d’hote in the Serbische Krone Hotel, in Belgrade, where I first set eyes on Andreas.  In the year 1876, Servia had thought proper to throw off the yoke of her Turkish suzerain, and to attempt to assert her independence by force of arms.  But for very irregularly paid tribute she was virtually independent already, and probably in all Servia there were not two hundred Turks.  But she ambitiously desired to have the name of as well as the actuality of being independent; the Russians helped her with arms, officers, and volunteer soldiers; and when I reached Belgrade, in May of the year named, there had already been fighting, in which the Servians had by no means got the worst.  No word of the Servian tongue had I, and it was the reverse of pleasant for a war correspondent in such plight to learn that outside of Belgrade nobody, or at least hardly anybody, knew a word of any other language than the native Servian.  As I ate, I was being attended by a very assiduous waiter, whose alertness and anxiety to please were very conspicuous.  He was smart with quite un-Oriental smartness; he whisked about the tables with deftness; he spoke to me in German, to the Russian officers over against me in what I assumed was Russian, to the Servians dining behind me in what I took to be Servian.  I liked the look of the man; there was intelligence in his aspect.  One could not call him handsome, but there was character in the keen black eye, the high features and the pronounced chin, fringed on either side by bushy black whiskers.

[Illustration:  “ANDREAS AS A FORAGER.”]

I had brought no servant with me; the average British servant is worse than useless in a foreign country, and the dubiously-polyglot courier is a snare and a deception on campaign.  I had my eye on Andreas for a couple of days, during which he was of immense service to me.  He seemed to know and stand well with everyone in Belgrade; it was he, indeed, who presented me in the restaurant to the Prime Minister and the Minister for War, who got together for me my field necessaries, who helped me to buy my horses, and who narrated to me the progress of the campaign so far as it had gone.  On the third day I had him in my room and asked whether he would like to come with me into the field as my servant.  He accepted the offer with effusion; we struck hands on the compact; he tendered me credentials which I ascertained to be extremely satisfactory; and then he gave me a little sketch of himself.  It was somewhat mixed, as indeed was his origin.  Primarily he was a Servian, but his maternal grandmother had been a Bosniak, an earlier ancestress had been in a Turkish harem, there was a strain in his blood of the Hungarian zinganee—­the gipsy of Eastern Europe, and one could not look at his profile without a suspicion that there was a Jewish element in his pedigree.  “A pure mongrel,” was what a gentleman of the British Legation termed Andreas, and this self-contradictory epithet was scarcely out of place.