only after a long acquaintance, and when I had become in a way naturalized, that I was able to provoke confidence in any Montenegrin.  The generations of isolation, surrounded only by enemies whom it was a duty to mislead,—­four hundred years of a national existence of combat and ruse, always at war, with no friend except far-off Russia,—­had developed the natural Slav indifference to the truth into a fine and singularly subtle habit of communicating nothings to any inquiring outsider, which never failed even the most humble clansman.  I was, however, pushed on from hand to hand by casual suggestions until I reached the Prince, who gave us audience under the famous tree where he heard appeals of all kinds, from petitions for help to the last recourse from the judgments of the tribunals, a final appeal to which every Montenegrin was entitled, and without which none submitted to an unfavorable judgment.

The moment was critical, for communications had been passing between Servia and Montenegro for an alliance and a declaration of war against the Sultan, for which the entire population of the principality was impatient, and when I arrived the rumor had begun to spread that Servia had yielded to diplomatic pressure and would decline the alliance.  The young Montenegrins were chafing, and the old men complaining that the young ones were growing up without fighting and would be nerveless.  The Prince was very guarded, but it was easy to gather from what he said that he neither could nor cared to restrain the people from going in limited numbers, and in an unobtrusive way, into Herzegovina to fight the Turks, and in fact he was perfectly within his rights to send his army there, for, curious as it may seem, the Turkish government had never terminated the de jure state of war with the principality, or acknowledged its independence, and the fighting in the vicinity of Niksich had been going on in an intermittent way for more than three hundred years, during which the city had been in a small way in as close a state of siege, probably, as Troy was for ten years.  As to operations in Herzegovina, small bands had been going and coming, concentrating when there was a movement to be made by either combatant, and slipping back across the frontier when they had had a brush, but all sub rosa.

The Prince, Nicholas, is personally a prepossessing man, and it was a good fortune which permitted me to study him and his people at a time when the primitive, antique virtue of the little nation had not been deteriorated by civilization, for it was then a pure survival of the patriarchal state, holding its own in the midst of an enslaved condition of all the population around.  He is a man of large mould, of a robust vigor which gave him a distinct physical preëminence amongst his people, with the effusive good humor which belongs, as a rule, to large men, and a hearty bonhomie which with that simple people was a bond to the most passionate devotion.  He is quick-witted and diplomatic,