Albania is likewise the only country that I know of where every one concerned becomes indignant if a murderer is sent to prison.  The relatives of the dear departed resent it because they feel that the judge has cheated them out of their revenge, which they would probably obtain, were the murderer at large, by putting a knife or a pistol bullet between his shoulders.  The murderer, of course, objects to the sentence both because he does not like imprisonment and because he believes that he could escape from the relatives of his victim were he given his freedom.  If he or his friends have any money, however, the affair is usually settled on a financial basis, the feud is called off, the murderer is pardoned, and every one concerned, save only the dead man, is as pleased and friendly as though nothing had ever happened to interrupt their friendly relations.  A quaint people, the Albanians.

In order to develop the resources of the country and to transform its present poverty into prosperity, Italy has already inaugurated an extensive scheme of public works, which includes the reclamation of the marshes, the reforestation of the mountains, the reconstruction of the highways, the improvement of the ports, and the construction of a railway straight across Albania, from the coast at Durazzo to Monastir, in Serbian Macedonia, where it will connect with the line from Belgrade to Salonika.  This railway will follow the route of one of the most important arteries of the Roman Empire, the Via Egnatia, that mighty military and commercial highway, a trans-Adriatic continuation of the Via Appia, which, starting from Dyracchium, the modern Durazzo, crossed the Cavaia plain to the Skumbi, climbed the slopes of the Candavian range, and traversing Macedonia and Thrace, ended at the Bosphorus, thus linking the capitals of the western and the eastern empires.  We traveled this age-old highway, down which the four-horse chariots of the Caesars had rumbled two thousand years ago, in another sort of chariot, with the power of twenty times four horses beneath its sloping hood.  This will entitle us in future years to listen with the condescension of pioneers to the tales of the tourists who make the same trans-Balkan journey in a comfortable wagon-lit, with hot and cold running water and electric lights and a dining-car ahead.  It is a great thing to have seen a country in the pioneer stage of its existence.

In that portion of Southern Albania known as North Epirus we motored for an entire day through a region dotted with what had been, apparently, fairly prosperous towns and villages but which are now heaps of fire-blackened ruins.  This wholesale devastation, I was informed to my astonishment, was the work of the Greeks, who, at about the time the Germans were horrifying the civilized world by their conduct in Belgium, were doing precisely the same thing, it is said, but on a far more extensive scale, in Albania.  As a result of these atrocities, perpetrated by a so-called