“But he never granted me the interview,” said the King sadly.  “In fact, he never acknowledged my letter.”

I attempted to bridge over the embarrassing pause by suggesting that perhaps the letter had never been received, but he waved aside the suggestion as unworthy of consideration.  I gathered from what he said that royal letters do not miscarry.

“I realize that I am an old man and that my country is a very small and unimportant one,” he continued, “while your President is the ruler of a great country and a very busy man.  Still, we in Montenegro had heard so much of America’s chivalrous attitude toward small, weak nations that I was unduly disappointed, perhaps, when my letter was ignored.  I felt that my age, and the fact that I have occupied the throne of Montenegro for sixty years, entitled me to the consideration of a reply.”

But we have strayed far from the road which we were traveling.  Let us get back to the people of the mountains; I like them better than the politicians.  Antivari, which nestles in a hollow of the hills, three or four miles inland from the port of the same name, is one of the most fascinating little towns in all the Balkans.  Its narrow, winding, cobble-paved streets, shaded by canopies of grapevines and bordered by rows of squat, red-tiled houses, their plastered walls tinted pale blue, bright pink or yellow, and the amazingly picturesque costumes of its inhabitants—­slender, stately Montenegrin women in long coats of turquoise-colored broad-cloth piped with crimson, Bosnians in skin-tight breeches covered with arabesques of braid and jackets heavy with embroidery, Albanians wearing the starched and pleated skirts of linen known as fustanellas and comitadjis with cartridge-filled bandoliers slung across their chests and their sashes bristling with assorted weapons, priests of the Orthodox Church with uncut hair and beards, wearing hats that look like inverted stovepipes, hook-nosed, white-bearded, patriarchal-looking Turks in flowing robes and snowy turbans, fierce-faced, keen-eyed mountain herdsmen in fur caps and coats of sheepskin—­all these combined to make me feel that I had intruded upon the stage of a theater during a musical comedy performance, and that I must find the exit and escape before I was discovered by the stage-manager.  If David Belasco ever visits Antivari he will probably try to buy the place bodily and transport it to East Forty-fourth Street and write a play around it.

There were two gentlemen in Antivari whose actions gave me unalloyed delight.  One of them, so I was told, was the head of the local anti-Serbian faction; the other, a human arsenal with weapons sprouting from his person like leaves from an artichoke, was the chief of a notorious band of comitadjis, as the Balkan guerrillas are called.  They walked up and down the main street of Antivari, arms over each other’s shoulders, heads close together, lost in conversation, but glancing quickly over their