We next saw a brilliantly striped rug hanging on the wall behind an old woman, red, green, yellow, black and white, just what we wanted.  She consented to take thirteen silver cronen for it, but no Montenegrin paper.  She explained she was poor.  She had brought up the sheep, spun and dyed the wool, and had woven the beautiful thing, and now she wanted silver because outside Scutari, in which the Montenegrins forced acceptance of their notes by corporal punishment, paper was worth nothing.  To get the silver we went into a general store and sold a sovereign.

[Illustration:  JO AND MR. SUMA IN THE SCUTARI BAZAAR.]

While we were waiting for the money-changer, two Miridite women came in.  They had short hair dyed black, white coarse linen chemises with large sleeves, embroidered zouaves, white skirts with front and back aprons lavishly embroidered, striped trousers, and stockings knitted on great diagonal patterns.

One of them told Suma that their village was in possession of Essad Pacha, that all their husbands had fled, and were still fighting in the hills.

Suma, for a joke, asked her what she thought of Jo.  Passing her eyes over Jo’s uninflated frame, she hesitated, but was urged to speak the truth.

“I think she is forty,” she remarked; and then somehow Jo was not quite pleased.

The midday heat being overwhelming we took a cab and drove back along two kilometres of dusty road.  A veiled woman stopped the coachman, asking him to give her tired little girl a lift.  Jehu refused, through awe of us; but we insisted on taking her, and begged the woman to come in too.  Jo held out her hands, but the woman shrank back horrified, though obviously worn out with the heat.

“That is a pity,” laughed Suma.  “I hoped she would do it.  It would have been a new experience for me.”

Jo confided to him her burning desire to enter a harem, but as he had no Mahommedan friends he thought the possibility remote.

Two more bourgeois women passed.  Jan photographed them, but not before they hid their faces with umbrellas.  Even the Christian men are intensely jealous, and their women have some Turkish ideals.  We spent the afternoon sketching outside a barber’s shop, coffee being brought to us on a hanging tray with a little fire on it to keep the coffee warm.  Opposite was a shop which combined the trades of blacksmith and fishmonger.  It seemed the strangest mixture.

We dined with the Frenchman.  He was a queer fellow, seeming only interested in economies, his digestion and his old age; and he discussed the possible places where an old man might live in comfort.  Egypt, he dismissed:  too hot, and an old man does not want to travel.  The Greek islands had earthquakes.  Corfu, he had heard, was depressing; while in the Canaries there was sometimes a wind and one might catch cold.  We suggested “heaven,” and he looked hurt.  He had been in Scutari in December.  He told us that after dark it was impossible to walk down the great main street, which divides Christian from Turk, without carrying a lighted lantern to signal that you were not on nefarious intent, or you might be shot.