A lady of good family but bad character suddenly decided to leave Montenegro, and fled to the shores of Cattaro, carrying with her a large number of State secrets.  The Court was aghast.  What was to be done?

A villain was needed.  The father was decided upon, and with the help of the lady’s brothers she was kidnapped, carried back to Montenegro, and disappeared for ever.  For which noble work he was permitted to return to his village.

The old lady had a supreme contempt for the Montenegrins who had not “travelled,” but she looked upon the growing pomp of the Court with suspicion.

“Ah,” she said, “those were fine days when the king was only the Gospodar, and there were none of these gold embroidered uniforms about, and the Queen and I used to slide down the Palace banisters together.”

In those days the Royal family inhabited the top story only, while the ground floor was filled with wood for the winter.  Just round the corner was the old pink palace, now used as a riding school.  It had been the first place in Montenegro to possess a billiard-table.  So, billiard-tables being rarer and more curious than kings—­the palace had been called the BILLIADO.

The Queen, whatever agility she may have possessed once when navigating banisters, is now a sedate and domestic person, and doesn’t hold with bluestockings, notwithstanding the “Higher Education” of some of her daughters.

The story goes that once when the King was away she inaugurated one of those thorough-paced spring cleanings dear to most women’s hearts; ordered the dining-room furniture into the street, and superintended the beating of it.  Women hold a poor position in Montenegro, but one of character can carry all before her.  A well-known English nurse was managing a hospital in Cettinje during the first Balkan War.  One of her patients, though well connected as peasants often are in Montenegro, was a drunken old reprobate, and she told the authorities he must go.  They demurred—­his relations must not be offended.  She insisted.  They did nothing.  One morning they found him, bed and all, in the middle of the street opposite the King’s palace.

The authorities swallowed their lesson.

In the evening we walked over the stony hills with our host, and first had a glimpse of the real character of the country which had for so long kept the Turks at bay.  One realized how much the people owed to the land for their boasted independence.  Barren rock and scrub oak, no army could live here in sufficient numbers to subdue even a semi-warlike nation.  Cettinje has been burned many a time by the Moslem, but starvation eventually drove him back to the fatter plains of the Sanjak, leaving a profitless victory behind him.  Napoleon and Moscow over again.

More miners from America passed with their showy machine-woven clothes, accompanied by their wives, who had evidently stayed behind in the old country.  Otherwise they would have picked up new-fangled ideas about the rights of women, and would certainly have refused to shoulder the enormous American suit cases while their men ambled carelessly in front.