One of the doctors had been in Albania, on an inoculating expedition.  At Durazzo he had been received by Essad Pacha, who was delighted to have his piano played, and to watch the hammers working inside.  Like Helen’s babies, “he wanted to see the wheels go wound.”  The piano and piles of music must have been a memento of the Prince and Princess of Wied and of their unhappy attempts at being Mpret and Mpretess—­or is it Mpretitza, or Mpretina?  The music was still marked with her name, and was certainly not a present to Essad.

The stamp of the English was on Uskub.  Prices were high.  One Turk offered us a rubbishy silver thing for fifteen dinars; and Jan laughed, saying that one could see the English had been there.  Without blushing the man pointed to a twin article, saying he would let that go for five dinars.

What caused us to feel that we had wandered enough?  Was it the awful cinematograph show which led us through an hour and a half of melodrama without our grasping the plot, or was it that the large copper tray we bought filled us with a sense of responsibility?

At this wavering moment Lady Paget held a meeting of her staff.  We lunched there, and part of the truth leaked out after the meeting.

The Bulgars really were coming in against us, and in a day or two we were to see things.

That decided the matter.  We went to the prefect’s office for our pass.  Firstly, we were ushered into a room occupied by a man in khaki, whose accent betrayed that he hailed from the States.  He was “something sanitary,” and belonged to the American commission, so we tried again.  This time the porter took us up to a landing, said a few words into a doorway, and left us standing.  As he was wandering in our vicinity, Jo tried one of her two talismans:  it is the word “PREPOSTEROUS” ejaculated explosively, and is safely calculated to stagger a foreign soul.  The other is a well-known dodge.  If a person bothers you, look at his boots with a pained expression.  He will soon take himself off—­boots and all.

The talisman worked, the pass was quickly managed, and we had but to spend our time among the shops again.  We resisted the seductions of an old man with fifty knives in his belt, who reminded Jo of a horrible nightmare of her infancy.

In her dream a grandfather with a basket had come peddling.  Suddenly his coat, blowing aside, revealed not a body, but a busy sewing-machine in excellent working order.  In her agitation, Jo fell out of bed.

We sat consuming beer outside a cafe decked with pink flowered bushes in green boxes.  One of the antique dames who cook sausages in the shadow of the cafes brought us a plate each—­funny little hard things—­and we bought cakes and nougat from perambulating Peter Piemen.

The station platform was like the last scene of a pantomime.  Every one we had met on our journeys rushed up and shook us by the hand.