From Palesh we started with fine weather for Skela, through a beautifully wooded park, some fields being here and there inclosed with wattling.  Skela is a new ferry on the Save, to facilitate the communication with Austria.

Near here are redoubts, where Kara Georg, the father of the reigning prince, held out during the disasters of 1813, until all the women and children were transferred in safety to the Austrian territory.  Here we met a very pretty girl, who, in answer to the salute of my fellow-travellers, bent herself almost to the earth.  On asking the reason, I was told that she was a bride, whom custom compels, for a stated period, to make this humble reverence.

We then came to the Skela, and seeing a large house within an enclosure, I asked what it was, and was told that it was the reconciliation-house, (primiritelnj sud,) a court of first instance, in which cases are decided by the village elders, without expense to the litigants, and beyond which suits are seldom carried to the higher courts.  There is throughout all the interior of Servia a stout opposition to the nascent lawyer class in Belgrade.  I have been more than once amused on hearing an advocate, greedy of practice, style this laudable economy and patriarchal simplicity—­“Avarice and aversion from civilization.”  As it began to rain we entered a tavern, and ordered a fowl to be roasted, as the soup and stews of yester-even were not to my taste.  A booby, with idiocy marked on his countenance, was lounging about the door, and when our mid-day meal was done I ordered the man to give him a glass of slivovitsa, as plum brandy is called.  He then came forward, trembling, as if about to receive sentence of death, and taking off his greasy fez, said, “I drink to our prince Kara Georgovich, and to the progress and enlightenment of the nation.”  I looked with astonishment at the torn, wretched habiliments of this idiot swineherd.  He was too stupid to entertain these sentiments himself; but this trifling circumstance was the feather which indicated how the wind blew.  The Servians are by no means a nation of talkers; they are a serious people; and if the determination to rise were not in the minds of the people, it would not be on the lips of the baboon-visaged oaf of an insignificant hamlet.

The rain now began to pour in torrents, so to make the most of it, we ordered another magnum of strong red wine, and procured from the neighbourhood a blind fiddler, who had acquired a local reputation.  His instrument, the favourite one of Servia, is styled a goosely, being a testudo-formed viol; no doubt a relic of the antique, for the Servian monarchy derived all its arts from the Greeks of the Lower Empire.  But the musical entertainment, in spite of the magnum of wine, and the jovial challenges of our fellow traveller from the Drina, threw me into a species of melancholy.  The voice of the minstrel, and the tone of the instrument, were soft and melodious,