to be lost; you must go home and take care of your mother.”  The boy began to cry bitterly.  The Prince then asked him if he would go home quietly and stay there, or take a flogging and be allowed to fight.  He shook his head and stood silent a little while and then broke out, “Well! it isn’t for stealing; I’ll take the flogging!” that being the deepest disgrace which can befall a Montenegrin.  And he broke down utterly when the Prince finally said that he must go home, for his family was a distinguished one, and he was not willing that no man should be left of it to keep the name.  “But,” said the boy, “I want to avenge my father and brothers,” this being the highest obligation of every Montenegrin.  The boy went away still crying, but when he had gone the Prince said, “I know that he will be in the next battle in spite of anything I can say.”

CHAPTER XXVII

THE INSURRECTION IN HERZEGOVINA

I have anticipated the events of the year, but this illustration of the character of the little people whose tenacity and courage put their mark on European history during the subsequent three years will help to give significance to the story.  Without being undiplomatically frank, on the one hand, or attempting to conceal his rôle on the other, the Prince allowed me to see that everything depended on Montenegrin action, and that he, to a certain extent, must permit his people to follow their sympathies.  The young men went in groups without any pretense of organization, with their rifles and yataghans, and, when the opportunity offered, took part in any pending skirmish, and then came home, to be replaced by others.  To have forbidden this would have made the people mutinous, and the Dalmatians, though under the authority of Austria, were no more closely held to neutrality than the Montenegrins.  The Austrian Slavs could not be permitted to be more patriotic than the Montenegrin; and the Prince, after having attempted to quiet the former by sending old Peko Pavlovich to bring them to reason, and found that the matter could not be settled in that way, allowed Peko to take a band of young men into Herzegovina and assume the direction of the insurrection.

There was nothing more to be learned in Montenegro that belonged to war correspondence, and I went back to Cattaro.  There I learned that there was a great assemblage of refugees at Grahovo, a remote corner of the principality, which could best be reached from the Bocche; and enlisting the agent of the Austrian Lloyds as guide and interpreter, I went by way of Risano and the country of the Crivoscians, a Slavonic tribe who gave great trouble to the Romans in their day, and to their successors in that part of the world, the Austrians, whom they defeated disastrously in 1869.  The Crivoscians contributed an important element to the forces of the insurrection; they were held to be great thieves, but greater Turk fighters, and on the way to Grahovo we met many of them coming home wounded, or carrying their booty from the recent battles (one amongst them had forgotten whether he was seventy-five or seventy-six), for there had been serious fighting in the corner of the Herzegovina adjacent.