rounder, his moustache went up and down, he threatened everybody with instant execution, like the Red Queen in “Alice.”  Then he found that no motor was awaiting us.  He rushed to the telephone while we had a belated lunch.  No motors; one was out taking the Serbian officers for a joy-ride; Prince Peter had taken the other to Antivari.  Montenegro seemed to have no more.  We soothed ourselves with “American” grapes.  This grape tastes not unlike strawberries and cream, but not having the same sentimental associations, does not come off quite as well.  We heard a motor coming.  Dr. Ob ran out to intercept it.  It was crammed.  Then the telephone boy brought a message that Prince Peter’s motor would not return till to-morrow.

Miss Petrovitch wrung her hands.

“We cannot stay here the night,” she said.

“Are the bugs awful?” we asked.

“It’s not the bugs, it’s those dreadful women,” she answered.  “We shall all be murdered in our beds.”

Now the women appeared to us most inoffensive.

Dr. Ob was purple with rage.  He stamped his foot.

“But I am a minister,” he kept repeating crescendo, till he shouted to the villagers, “But I am a minister.”

It is impossible to take Montenegro seriously.  Situations occur at every corner which remind one irresistibly of “the Rose and the Ring,” and we wondered what would happen next.  There were other belated passengers who had hoped for conveyance, and the Frenchman’s carriage had not turned up.  Dr. Ob at last decided to commandeer a cocked hat boat rowed by four women with which to navigate the river to Rieka, and thence by carriage to Cettinje if carriages came.  It was six p.m., we might reach Rieka by ten.

We rowed out through the half-sunken trees.  At the end of a spit of land was a man gnawing a piece of raw beef.  We shouted to him to ask what he was doing; and he answered that he was curing his malaria.  The two women in the bow were very pretty, one was a mere child.

There were wisps of sunset cloud in the sky, and soon night came quite down.

As it grew dark all sense of motion disappeared.  The boat shrugged uneasily with the movement of the oars, the rowlocks made of loops of twisted osier creaked, but one could not perceive that one was going forwards.  The hills lost their solidity, becoming mere holes in the grey blue of the sky, a bright planet made a light smudge on the ruffled water in which the stars could not reflect.  As we crept forwards into the river and the mountains closed in, the water became more calm, and the stars came out one by one beneath us, while in the ripple of our wake the image of the planet ran up continuously in strings of little golden balls like a juggling trick.