The Austrian prisoners bade us a sad farewell, but many friends accompanied us to the station, and the rotund major and his rounder wife did us the like honour.  Our major was a queer mixture:  he was jolly because he was fat, and he was stern because he had a beaky nose, and in any interview one had first to ascertain whether the stomach or the nose held the upper hand, so to speak.  With the wife one was always sure—­she had a snub nose.  On this occasion the major furiously boxed the Austrian prisoner coachman’s ears, telling us that he was the best he had ever had.  The unfortunate driver was a picture of rueful pleasure.  The two plump dears stood waving four plump hands till we had rumbled round the corner of the landscape.

In the train to Nish it was intensely hot.  We had sixteen or seventeen fellow-passengers in our third-class wooden-seated carriage—­all the firsts had been removed, because they could not be disinfected—­and the windows, with the exception of two, had been screwed tightly down.  Every time we stood up to look at the landscape somebody slipped into our seat, and we were continually sitting down into unexpected laps.  Expostulations, apologies, and so on.  Somebody had gnawed a piece from one of the wheels, and we lurched through the scenery with a banging metallic clangour which made conversation difficult, in spite of which Jo astonished the natives by her colloquial and fluent Serbian.  We had an enormous director of a sanitary department and a plump wife, evidently risen, but fat people rise in Serbia automatically like balloons.  We had three meagre old gentlemen, one unshaven for a week, one whiskered since twenty years with Piccadilly weepers like a stage butler; some ultra fashionable girls and men; and a dear old dumb woman wearing three belts, who had been a former outpatient; and several sticky families of children.

The old gentlemen took a huge interest in Jo.  They drew her out in Serbian, and at every sentence turned each to the other and elevated their hands, ejaculating “kako!” (how!) in varying terms of admiration and flattery.

The American has not yet ousted the Turk from Serbia, and the bite from our wheel banged off the revolutions of our sedate passing.  Trsternik’s church—­modern but good taste—­gleamed like a jewel in the sun against the dark hills.  On either hand were maize fields with stalks as tall as a man, their feathery tops veiling the intense green of the herbage with a film, russet like cobwebs spun in the setting sun.  There were plum orchards—­for the manufacture of plum brandy—­so thick with fruit that there was more purple than green in the branches, and between the trunks showed square white ruddy-roofed hovels with great squat tile-decked chimneys.  Some of the houses were painted with decorations of bright colours, vases of flowers or soldiers, and on one was a detachment of crudely drawn horsemen, dark on the white walls, meant to represent the heroes of old Serbian poetry.