The honesty was singular.  I remember that one day, when I was in Cettinje, two Austrian officers came up from Cattaro, and one of them lost on the road a gold medal he wore, which was picked up by a poor woman passing with a load over the same road, and she went to Cattaro and spent a large portion of the day hunting for the officer who had lost the medal.  Sexual immorality was so rare that a single case in Cettinje was the excited gossip of the place for weeks; but to this virtue the influence of the Russian officers during the year of the great war was disastrous.  The Russians introduced beggary and prostitution, and the crowd of adventurers from everywhere during the two later years made theft common; but stealing was considered such a disgrace by the Montenegrins that during all my residence there I had only one experience,—­the theft of a small pocket revolver by my first Dalmatian horse-keeper, and I think that robbery with violence was never heard of in the principality.  During the third year I carried, for distribution among the families of the killed and wounded, the large subsidies of the Russian committees, amounting to several hundred pounds in gold, and in this service I penetrated to the remotest parts of the principality until I reached the Turkish posts in Old Servia, countries of the wildest character, with a very sparse population; and, though it was known that I carried those sums, I was never molested, though I had only one man for escort.  And during the two campaigns which I made with the Prince, living in a tent, on the pole of which hung my dispatch-bag containing my store of small money (it being impossible to obtain change for a piece of gold anywhere in the interior), and no guard being kept on the tents, I never lost a zwanziger, or any other article than a girth by which the blanket was fastened on my horse when grazing at night; and, as the blanket came back, even that did not look like a theft.

And yet so poor and so contented were they that the life of the primitive man could not have been much simpler.  I have seen, in the cold end of September, in the high mountain districts, a whole family of little children, whose united rags would not have made a comfortable garment for one of them, playing with glee in the fields.  On one occasion, when I had been caught by the heavy autumn rains in remote Moratcha, roads washed away and riding a mile impossible, I had to take with me two or three men, beside my guide and horse boy, to make a road where I had to travel, and we were obliged to halt for the night at one of the poorest villages I ever saw in Montenegro.  The best house in it was offered me, with such fare as they had, to supplement bread which I had brought from the convent.  The house had but one room, with a large bedstead built in it of small trees in the rough, and the beaten ground for floor.  The bed was given up to me, and the family lay on the ground with a layer of straw, which was all that the