was of one room, from which the animals were excluded, with the usual floor of beaten earth.  A huge bedstead of small fir poles, the only important piece of furniture in it, was assigned to me, and the family—­all women and children—­spread their rugs on the ground.  After eating a supper brought from the convent, and some potatoes, the only provision, except a little coarse maize bread which the house afforded, we went to bed.  The bedstead was abundantly provided with straw, but nought beside, and the fleas routed me from my first sleep and compelled me to evacuate the premises.  I took my mattress and went out where my pony was picketed, and, spreading it in his lee, to break the cold north wind fresh from the mountain, I tried to sleep.

The poor horse had supped miserably; a little barley from the convent and some musty hay furnished by the woman of the house, but which even in his hunger he refused to eat, left him ill-compensated for a hard day’s walk, and he turned his head to me now and then with a coaxing whinney which was as plain a supplication for something to eat as I could have made myself, but the only effect of which was to break my doze as soon as begun, until I lost my patience with him, and gave him a sound box on the ear, when he turned his head from me, and lay down again.  It made my heart ache to be unkind to him, for he was the gentlest and most serviceable friend I had in Montenegro, but I could get nothing to give him if I had paid a guinea the pound for it, and he would not let me sleep.  The intelligent brute felt what language could not tell him, and ceased his complaint, though the blow I gave him would hardly have killed a gad-fly on his hair; but it sufficed, and gave me more discomfort than him, for I did not cease to reproach myself for the ungrateful return for his fidelity.  But I slept no more, and watched the stars in their courses till the dawn.

A glass of milk and a crust of the bread I had brought from the convent made my breakfast, and we pushed on to our next stopping-place, the convent of Piperski Celia.  The road lay for the first hour through a forest of beeches and firs, the former the finest, as timber, I ever saw—­straight trunks, thirty or forty feet to the first limb; in some places the beech being the exclusive wood, and in others the fir, but all a luxuriant growth.  Properly worked, this forest would have made a great revenue for the principality.  Before the war it had been leased to a French company, and many trees were lying in all stages of preparation for rafting down the Moratsha.  This was succeeded by a forest entirely of firs, also splendid trees, and then we came into a region which was beyond all my experience or imagination,—­a wide and barren waste of rock, gray, glistening in the now burning sun, and without a trace of vegetation that could be recognized by the casual vision.  There was no soil, and apparently never had been any, and the silvery-gray of the lichenous limestone blinded