My reception in Cettinje was one of the pleasant incidents of my career as correspondent, for it was marked by a grateful cordiality unique in my experience, and I saw that a people and a Prince could retain gratitude for past services where nothing was needed or to be expected in the future.  The Prince received me as a brother.  There was no time to revisit under happier circumstances the familiar places as I should have been glad to do, but I determined at least to see the new possessions on the coast, and passing from Cattaro I followed the coast road by Spizza, the impregnable (if defended) fortress which had surrendered to Montenegro towards the close of the war, and was, without the shadow of a right, taken possession of by Austria in the settlement, and made a halt at Antivari.  Here all was decay and ruin; the damages by the bombardment years before had not been repaired, the former Albanian inhabitants, mainly Mussulmans, had not returned, and the Montenegrins had not come.  I could not even pass the night there, but took a boat from the port (there is no harbor) to Dulcigno.  The owner of the boat put a mattress in it where I could lie at length, and so, sleeping, or listening to the songs of the rowers, or watching the stars overhead, I found myself in the course of the night at Dulcigno, where I was warmly received and hospitably entertained by the governor, a comrade of the war-days.  With a little expenditure and energy Dulcigno might be made a delightful winter resort, the climate being that of Naples and the surroundings picturesque, but Montenegro has neither the capital nor the appliances to profit by its position.  A company had proposed to the Prince to build a port and construct a hotel and all necessary appurtenances if he would give, in compensation, the right of establishing gaming-tables, after the fashion of Monte Carlo, but the Prince, awake to the importance of maintaining the respect of Europe so fairly won, refused the offer.

From Dulcigno the road I had to take to Scutari was a plunge into the unknown.  I hired two horses, one a pack-horse for the baggage and the other a poor hack for riding.  The roads were fetlock deep in mud, and the whole region so inundated that we often had to take across country, profiting by the ridges to avoid fording the unconjecturable depths of water in the ancient roads.  At one point we had to pass a deep ditch, over which I forced my horse to jump, but the baggage horse refused it until pushed to it by main force, when he plumped in over head, ears, and baggage, and we had very great difficulty to extricate him, as the water was at least four feet below the bank.  But I reached Scutari fortunately before night, wet, bedraggled, and muddied from head to foot, my clothes in tatters from the tenacious wait-a-bit thorn hedges we had had to force our way through, and all my baggage soaked, more or less as the water had had time to penetrate to it.  Not an inhabited house did we pass on the way, such had been the terror