the hands of the enemy, and no quarter being given in battle by the Montenegrins, though Turks who surrendered in a siege were kept as prisoners during the war.  I had seen Mukhtar at Ragusa during the conference at the time of the armistice, and he bore out in his personal appearance the description which Osman Pasha gave of him,—­dreamy, fanatical, ascetic, who gave his confidence to no one, and who said, when Selim proposed a council of war before Vucidol, “If my fez knew what was in my head I would burn it,” and refused to listen to the cautionary measures Selim advised preliminary to the attack.  The ascetic and the fanatic was written in his face.  Returning to Cettinje, I found Osman there a prisoner on parole, and at my intercession he was permitted to accompany me to Ragusa, where I returned after a few days, life in Montenegro being intolerably dull except during the fighting.

The next movement on the part of the Turks, which was expected to be one by Dervish Pasha, from the base of Podgoritza towards Cettinje, called me into the field again.  We took position along the heights of Koumani, on the verge of the great table-land which intervenes between Rieka and Danilograd, and from which we could see the Turkish camps spread out on the plain below us; and if the Turks had but known where we were, they might have thrown their shells from the blockhouses in the plain into our camp.  There was no attack for the moment, and the scouts of the Montenegrins used to amuse themselves by arousing the Turkish camps in the night or by stealing the horses and mules from the guards set over them.  A band of seven stole, during this suspension of operations, forty horses and brought them into the camp, and one, more cunning and light-footed than the rest, stole the pasha’s favorite horse from the tent where he was guarded by two soldiers sleeping at the entrance, and brought him to the Prince at Koumani.  He had to take the precaution of wrapping the creature’s hoofs in rags before bringing him out of the tent.  When the object was to stir the Turks out of their rest, a half-dozen men would crawl up to the stone wall which they invariably threw up around the camp, and lay their rifles on it, for there was never a sentry set, and fire rapidly into the tents as many shots as they could before rousing the camp, and then scatter and run.  The whole battalion would turn out and continue firing in every direction over the country for half an hour, while the artillery, as soon as the guns could be manned, followed the example, and almost every night we were roused from our sleep by the booming of the guns.