Picture, if you please, a country remarkably similar in its physical characteristics to the Blue Ridge Region of our own South, with the same warm summers and the same brief, cold winters, peopled by the same poverty-stricken, illiterate, quarrelsome, suspicious, arms-bearing, feud-practising race of mountaineers, and you will have the best domestic parallel of Albania that I can give you.  Though during the summer months extremely hot days are followed by bitterly cold nights, and though fever is prevalent along the coast and in certain of the valleys, Albania is, climatically speaking, “a white man’s country.”  Its mountains are believed to contain iron, coal, gold, lead, and copper, but the internal condition of the country has made it quite impossible to investigate its mineral resources, much less to develop them.  With the exception of Valona, which has been developed into a tolerably good harbor, there are no ports worthy of the name, Durazzo, Santi Quaranta, and San Giovanni de Medua being mere open roadsteads, almost unprotected from the sea winds.  There are no railroads in Albania, and the indifference of the Turkish Government, the corruption of the local chiefs, and the blood-feuds in which the people are almost constantly engaged, have resulted in a total absence of good roads.  This condition has been remedied by the Italians, however, who, in order to facilitate their military operations, constructed a system of highways very nearly equal to those they built in the Alps.  Though the greater part of the country is a stranger to the plow, the small areas which are under cultivation produce excellent olive oil, wine of a tolerable quality, a strong but moderately good tobacco, and considerable grain; Albania, in spite of its primitive agricultural methods, furnishing most of the corn supply of the Dalmatian coast.

Albania, so far as I am aware, is the only country where you can buy a wife on the instalment plan, just as you would buy a piano or an encyclopedia or a phonograph.  It is quite true that there are plenty of countries where women can be purchased—­in Circassia, for example, and in China, and in the Solomon Group—­but in those places the prospective bridegroom is compelled to pay down the purchase price in cash, not being afforded the convenience of opening an account.  In Albania, however, such things are better done, a partial payment on the purchase price of the girl being paid to her parents when the engagement takes place, after which she is no longer offered for sale, but is set aside, like an article on which a deposit has been made, until the final instalment has been paid, when she is delivered to her future husband.