in the Eastern state of activity, in which time is of no account; and, instead of getting off in the early morning to return before night, as arranged, we left Ragusa at 2 P.M.  We were in October, and the shortening days did not favor long journeys, and the road was even worse than those in Montenegro.  On the way across the frontier the going was simply climbing a Cyclopean stairway, and we reached the camp only at dusk.

Grebci was an abandoned village of the Herzegovinian population, robbed and maltreated even here within a rifle-shot of the Austrian territory, and the entire population had taken refuge across the frontier.  There was a reunion of all the bands, amounting to about 900 men, of whom 250 were Montenegrins under old Peko Pavlovich, a wiry, wily, Slavonic Ulysses, who had been in more than ninety battles with the Turks, and who knew and used every stratagem of this border warfare.  There was Melentie, the fighting Archimandrite of the convent of Duzi; Luka Petcovich, a Herzegovinian of the Montenegrin frontier, a tried Turk fighter; and the fighting popes of three villages of Orthodox Christians, Bogdan Simonich, Minje, and Milo.  There was a small band of Italians, with one Frenchman, Barbieux,—­one of the bravest of the brave and an ex-Zouave officer,—­ten Russians, and a few Servians.  We were in for a night, and had brought no provender, while all the food in camp was the half of an old goat and some flinty ship’s biscuit.  The goat was roasted before the camp-fire, laid on a timber platform, which served for bed by night and table by day, and hacked to pieces by the yataghans which had come from the battle two days before.  The meat was tough beyond exaggeration, and the biscuit had to be broken with a stone into small pieces; but we had wine, for this abounded across the frontier and was indispensable.  We heard the story of the fight at Utovu, where the insurgents had been taken in a trap by treachery of the weak chiefs of a Catholic village, and escaped with the loss of only four killed, owing to the precautions of the wily Peko, who, like an experienced fox, never went into a possible trap without seeing the way out of it; but they brought away the visible proofs of their fight in the noses of fifty-eight Turkish soldiers killed.  In the custom of the country the nose of an enemy stands as the logarithm of his head, which is inconvenient of transportation in number; and, though the Prince had forbidden the mutilation of the dead, it was impossible to enforce the prohibition out of Montenegro, and this was the only proof of the actual fruits of victory permitted by the circumstances.