Njegush, the village in which the Prince was born, was a collection of a score or more of stone cottages of two rooms on the ground floor, with two or three—­of which one was the house of the Petrovich family—­of two stories, simple as the people we saw moving about, the women carrying heavy loads on their backs, and a few ragged children peeping round the corners of the houses at the foreigners passing through.  Suspicion was on every face, for the foreigner was still an enemy.  We had taken the trouble to send word to Cettinje that we were coming up on that day, and the coming of a correspondent of the “Times” apparently had some importance to Montenegro, for we had found and made friends with, in the market-place where our baggage horses were to be hired, a senator of the principality who had accidentally come down from Cettinje, and we did not suspect that he had been sent down to see if there was danger in our visit or not; and so suspicious was the little community that every Montenegrin set himself, without orders and by the instinct of danger, to watch every stranger within the gates.

The road from Njegush to Cettinje, at present replaced by a good carriage road, was worse than that from Cattaro, a craggy climb over which it would have been hardly possible to ride a mule, had I had one to ride; but from the crown of the pass over which we had to go, there is one of the finest wide views I have ever seen, over the plains of Northern Albania and the Lake of Scutari, with the mountains of Epirus in the extreme distance.  The bad roads were part of the Montenegrin system, which, as the Prince later explained to me, was not to make roads for Austrian artillery.

Cettinje was a poor village of one-story houses, with two or three exceptions of two-storied ones, of which the principal was the “palace,” a residence which in another country would have been a poor gentleman’s country house.  Our senatorial herald had gone ahead and announced our coming and our friendliness, and the hotel, the second largest building in the village, had rooms ready for us, and the little world of the Montenegrin capital had put on the air of nonchalance, as if such things as the arrival of a “Times” correspondent and a foreign cavalry officer were things of everyday occurrence.  No one would condescend to show curiosity; all were as impassive as Red Indians; and though we were the only strangers there, no one seemed at all curious about our business.  This was the manner of the entire population, and it was a trait which I soon realized in everybody, from highest to lowest, that they kept the habitual garb of an incurious reticence, neither asking nor giving information.  We found, as if carelessly loitering around the hotel, or playing billiards in it, several young men who spoke excellent French, and we laid cautious traps for conversation, but no one could tell us any news or give us any information about the fighting, or answer any questions other than evasively.  And it was