with a knowledge of statecraft sufficient for the elementary condition of government over which he presided; and his subjects were not then so many that he did not know by name every head of a family amongst them.  He could give you off-hand the genealogy of each of the families which had, after the defeat of Kossovo, taken refuge in the Bielopolje, the central valley of the principality, from the defeat of Dushan down, and he knew all the traditions of their early history.  When the young men played at games of strength or skill, there were few who could pitch the stone so far or shoot so well, and perhaps those few had the tact not to let it be seen, so that he stood amongst his people as the model and type of all the heroic virtues.  In spite of his great physical proportions he was nervous and excitable.  In all but military abilities he had grown curiously to the measure of his place, and his diplomatic abilities more than compensated for the want of the military.  And what was most singular was that his early education in Paris had not spoiled the Montenegrin in him.

Probably much of this conserved character was due to the Princess, an admirable woman, who deserves a place amongst the world’s remarkable female sovereigns; for her energy, patriotism, and instinct of the obligations of the crisis were more remarkable than anything else connected with the house of Njegush.  Beautiful even at the period in which I first saw her, gifted with a tact and sympathetic manner quite regal in their reach, she held her husband up to action and decision when his own nerves were shaken.  A Montenegrin of voivode stock, the daughter of the commander-in-chief of the army, who had been the right-hand man of Mirko, the father of the Prince, the commander-in-chief of the previous reign, she had the true Amazonian temper, and would not have hesitated to take the field had the courage of her husband failed him; though, in tranquil times, she was a true Slavonic woman, domestic, affectionate in her family, and effacing herself before her husband.  I remember that the Prince told me that, after the splendid victory of Vucidol, he sent two couriers to announce to the Princess at Cettinje the news of the victory, and the first question she asked of them was, “Did the Prince show courage?” and when they replied, with a little Montenegrin craft, that they had had to hold him by force to keep him from plunging into the mêlée, she gave them each a half ducat.  “And,” said the Prince, “if they had said that I had led the charge, she would have given them a whole ducat.”

But, with all his civic virtues, the Prince was the very type of a despotic ruler.  The word “constitution” was his bugbear, and he would not abate one particular of his absolute power, or tolerate the slightest deflection of his authority in his family, any more than in the principality.  His will was the law, and though, in the details of administration, the voivodes and the “ministers” were trusted, nothing