Then we came into the long procession of refugees, mostly women and children, a dribbling stream of wretched humanity, carrying such remnants of their goods as their backs could bear up under, with a few old men, too old to fight, all seeking some hiding-place until the storm should be over,—­wretched, ragged, worn out by the fatigues of their hasty flight from “the abomination of desolation,” for it seemed as if he that was on the housetop had not gone down to take anything out of his house, and woe had been pronounced upon them that were with child and them that gave suck in those days.  I had seen enough of the horrors of suppression of Christian discontent by the Mussulmans of Crete, but the brutality of the Slavonic Islam in time of peace was other and bitterer than the Cretan, and the miserable remnant of escaped rayahs of Herzegovina was the very ragged fringe of humanity.  I wish every statesman who had ever favored tonics for the “sick man” could have stood where I did and have seen the long reiteration of the damning accusation against the “unspeakable Turk” in these escapes of the peaceful stragglers from massacre and rapine which every rising in the provinces of Turkey brings forth for the shame of our civilization.  There were whole families in such rags that they would not have been permitted to beg in the streets of any English city, lucky even to have escaped as families; parents whose daughters, even more miserable, had not been permitted to escape to starvation.  We found at Grahovo the body of which those we had seen were the fringe,—­a mass of despairing, melancholy humanity, brooding over the misery to come, homeless, foodless, and the guests of a people only less poor than themselves, the hospitable hovels of the Montenegrins housing a double charge.

I was desirous to learn from themselves the details of their oppression, and my friend questioned one group as to what they had to complain of.  It was practically everything but death,—­their cattle taken, their crops ravaged or reaped by the agas, the honor of wives and daughters the sport of any Mussulman ruffian who passed their way.  One tall, gaunt old woman, who had not spoken, but listened, with a face like a stone, to all that the others replied, suddenly threw her ragged robe over her head and burst into a tempest of tears.  Another turned to me a stolid face, saying, “Gospodin! we do not know what a virgin is!” I saw enough of it before I had finished to have made the world turn Turcophobe.  And twenty years later we hear of the same fruits of the same régime and, as I found then, Christian statesmen who tolerate it.