feet deep, outside of which a stone stairway, winding round and round the shaft, leads from top to bottom.  Openings through the wall, six feet high and three wide, occur at regular intervals all the way down, and, as we follow our ragged guide down, down into the damp and darkness by the feeble light of a tallow candle in a broken lantern, I cannot help thinking that these o’erhandy openings leading into the dark, watery depths have, in the tragic history of Belgrade, doubtless been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of more than one objectionable person.  It is not without certain involuntary misgivings that I take the lantern from the guide — whose general appearance is, by the way, hardly calculated to be reassuring — and, standing in one of the openings, peer down into the darksome depths, with him hanging on to my coat as an act of precaution.

The view from the ramparts of Belgrade fortress is a magnificent panorama, extending over the broad valley of the Danube — which here winds about as though trying to bestow its favors with impartiality upon Hungary, Servia, and Slavonia — and of the Save.  The Servian soldiers are camped in small tents in various parts of the fortress grounds and its environments, or lolling under the shade of a few scantily verdured trees, for the sun is to-day broiling hot.  With a population not exceeding one and a half million, I am told that Servia supports a standing army of a hundred thousand men; and, when required, every man in Servia becomes a soldier.  As one lands from the ferry-boat and looks about him he needs no interpreter to inform him that he has left the Occident on the other side of the Save, and to the observant stranger the streets of Belgrade furnish many a novel and interesting sight in the way of fanciful costumes and phases of Oriental life here encountered for the first time.  In the afternoon we visit the national museum of old coins, arms, and Eoman and Servian antiquities.  A banquet in a wine-garden, where Servian national music is dispensed by a band of female musicians, is given us in the evening by the club, and royal quarters are assigned us for the night at the hospitable mansion of Mr. Terzibachitch’s father, who is the merchant -prince of Servia, and purveyor to the court.  Wednesday morning we take a general ramble over the city, besides visiting the club’s head-quarters, where we find a handsome new album has been purchased for receiving our autographs.  The Belgrade wheelmen have names painted on their bicycles, as names are painted on steamboats or yachts:  “Fairy,” “Good Luck,” and “Servian Queen,” being fair specimens.  The cyclers here are sons of leading citizens and business men of Belgrade, and, while they dress and conduct themselves as becomes thorough gentlemen, one fancies detecting a certain wild expression of the eye, as though their civilization were scarcely yet established; in fact, this peculiar expression is more noticeable at Belgrade, and is