one with its glare in the sunlight.  Midway in it we came on an old Roman road, one of the finest pieces of antique engineering I ever saw.  In some places it was cut out of the solid rock like a dry canal, the banks being nearly as high as our heads, and the ruts of the chariot wheels were still there to show that the utter barrenness of the land had existed the same from ancient time.  It was probably the great road from Dyrrachium to the upper Danube.

We reached the convent too late to get to Danilograd that night, considering the condition of the roads, and I asked for shelter for the night.  Here, for the first time in my experience with Orthodox convents, lodgings were refused me by the old hegumenos, and I instantly ordered the horses to be loaded again, without attempting to soften his surliness.  A few minutes’ talk with the captain who was my escort showed him that I was a person too much in favor with the Prince to be treated with such derision, and he came to offer me a place to spread my mattress on a balcony exposed to the south wind and the rain; then, having begun to relent, he went further, and offered me a room, which I refused, and finally his own bed; but even that did not break my inflexible resentment.  When he became pathetic in his repentance, however, I accepted a balcony whence I could look down on the fortress of Spuz, within easy range of its sleeping batteries; and then he offered me a supper, which I accepted, and we made peace.  In the morning he had become humanized, and he gave me breakfast and showed me the body of St. Stephen, which is kept here in great reverence (not the proto-martyr, but a Montenegrin of the same name).  The saint lay in state in a magnificent coffin, as if embalmed, and in his hand was an old and time-yellowed embroidered handkerchief which looked as if it might have been there a century or two.  Remembering a dear friend in the Orthodox church to whom the relics of its saints were precious, I asked the hegumenos to sell me this handkerchief.  He replied that he dared not take it, but if I had the courage to do so he would not prevent me, so I took the relic and put a twenty franc piece in the treasury of the convent, and went my way.

I found the Prince in his villa at Orealuk, contemplating new movements in a distant future, and, there being evidently nothing to keep me there, I decided to go back to Cettinje and await what was evidently the operation in view,—­the movement on Antivari.  My poor little pony like myself, only half fed for days, was not in a condition for rapid travel, and, though we pushed on in the rain, which began again, as well as we could, when we reached Rieka it was nearly sunset.  Finding no preparation in the little house, our usual shelter there, for any guest, after giving the horse what small ration the village afforded, I resumed the journey at sunset.  The horse had come the last few miles very heavily; I had been in the saddle twelve to fourteen hours each of the last