Remounting our horses after sunset, we continued along the Drina, now dubiously illuminated by the chill pallor of the rising moon, while hill and dale resounded with the songs of our men.  No sooner had one finished an old metrical legend of the days of Stephan the powerful and Lasar the good, than another began a lay of Kara Georg, the “William Tell” of these mountains.  Sometimes when we came to a good echo the pistols were fired off; at one place the noise had aroused a peasant, who came running across the grass to the road crying out, “O good men, the night is advancing:  go no further, but tarry with me:  the stranger will have a plain supper and a hard couch, but a hearty welcome.”  We thanked him for his proffer, but held on.

At about ten o’clock we entered a thick dark wood, and after an ascent of a quarter of an hour emerged upon a fine open lawn in front of a large house with lights gleaming in the windows.  The ripple of the Drina was no longer audible, but we saw it at some distance below us, like a cuirass of polished steel.  As we entered the inclosure we found the house in a bustle.  The captain, a tall strong corpulent man of about forty years of age, came forward and welcomed me.

“I almost despaired of your coming to-night,” said he; “for on this ticklish frontier it is always safer to terminate one’s journey by sunset.  The rogues pass so easily from one side of the water to the other, that it is difficult to clear the country of them.”

He then led me into the house, and going through a passage, entered a square room of larger dimensions than is usual in the rural parts of Servia.  A good Turkey carpet covered the upper part of the room, which was fenced round by cushions placed against the wall, but not raised above the level of the floor.  The wall of the lower end of the room had a row of strong wooden pegs, on which were hung the hereditary and holyday clothes of the family, for males and females.  Furs, velvets, gold embroidery, and silver mounted Bosniac pistols, guns, and carbines elaborately ornamented.

The captain, who appeared to be a plain, simple, and somewhat jolly sort of man, now presented me to his wife, who came from the Austrian aide of the Save, and spoke German.  She seemed, and indeed was, a trim methodical housewife, as the order of her domestic arrangements clearly showed.  Another female, whom I afterwards learned to be the wife of an individual of the neighbourhood who was absent, attracted my attention.  Her age was about four and twenty, when the lines of thinking begin to mingle with those of early youth.  In fact, from her tint I saw that she would soon be passata:  her features too were by no means classical or regular, and yet she had unquestionably some of that super-human charm which Raphael sometimes infused into his female figures, as in the St. Cecilia.  As I repeated and prolonged my gaze, I felt that I had seen no eyes in Belgrade like those of the beauty of the Drina, who reminded me of the highest characteristic of expression—­“a spirit scarcely disguised enough in the flesh.”  The presence of a traveller from an unknown country seemed to fill her with delight; and her wonder was childish, as if I had come from some distant constellation in the firmament.