and the bullets from the trenches flying around them, but not one hastening her step or paying the least attention to the danger.  This is the habit of the Montenegrin woman, who would consider herself disgraced by a display of fear, no matter what the danger.  I have seen them go down to the trenches where their husbands were lying for days together, during which time the wives brought the rations every five days, and they always took the opportunity to discuss the affairs of the household deliberately, though under fire, and walk away as unconcernedly.

But our quarters at Studenitzi were not to the taste of the attachés who took no part in the fighting, and we broke camp, and moved off to the edge of the plain, all the time under the fire of the artillery of the fortress.  The Montenegrin artillery was brought up, and one by one the little forts which studded the margin of the broad expanse were taken.  The first attacked held out till the shells penetrated its thin walls, and then surrendered unconditionally.  The garrison, twenty or more Albanian nizams, were brought to the headquarters, and we all turned out to see them.  Bagged, half famished, and frightened they were, and, through an Albanian friend who interpreted for me, I offered them coffee.  They looked at me with a surprise in their eyes like that of a wild deer taken in a trap, and resigned to its fate, knowing that escape was impossible; and when they had drunk the coffee they asked if we were going to decapitate them now.  When I assured them that there was no more question of their decapitation than of mine, and that they were perfectly safe, they broke into a discordant jubilation like that of a children’s school let loose; life had nothing more to give them.  They had no desire to be sent back to their battalions, and they stayed with us, drawing the pay and rations they should have had, and rarely got, when under their own flag.

The scene our camp presented was one to be found probably under no other sky than that which spread over us in the highlands of Montenegro.  The tents of the Prince, the chiefs, and the attachés were pitched in a circle, in the centre of which at night was a huge camp-fire, round which we sat and listened to stories or discussions, or to the Servian epics sung by the Prince’s bard, to the accompaniment of the guzla, to which the assembly listened in a silence made impressive by the tears of the hardened old warriors, most of whom knew the pathetic record by heart, and never ceased to warm with patriotic pride at the legends of the heroic defense, the rout of Kossovo, and the fall of the great empire, of which they were the only representatives who had never yielded to the rule of the Turk.  Substitute for the rocky ridge which formed the background of the scene the Dardanelles, and the fleet drawn up on the shore before Troy, and you have a parallel such as no other country in our time could give.  Both armies retired to their tents at nightfall, and no sentries or outposts