The rain ceased soon after noon on Sunday, and, although the roads are all but impassable, I pull out southward at five o’clock on Monday morning, trundling up the mountain-roads through mud that frequently compels me to stop and use the scraper.  After the summit of the hills between Bela Palanka and Pirot is gained, the road descending into the valley beyond becomes better, enabling me to make quite good time into Pirot, where my passport.undergoes an examination, and is favored with a vise by the Servian officials preparatory to crossing the Servian and Bulgarian frontier about twenty kilometres to the southward.  Pirot is quite a large and important village, and my appearance is the signal for more excitement than the Piroters have experienced for many a day.  While I am partaking of bread and coffee in the hotel, the main street becomes crowded as on some festive occasion, the grown-up people’s faces beaming with as much joyous anticipation of what they expect to behold when I emerge from the hotel as the unwashed countenances of the ragged youngsters around them.  Leading citizens who have been to Paris or Vienna, and have learned something about what sort of road a ’cycler needs, have imparted the secret to many of their fellow-townsmen, and there is a general stampede to the highway leading out of town to the southward.  This road is found to be most excellent, and the enterprising people who have walked, ridden, or driven out there, in order to see me ride past to the best possible advantage, are rewarded by witnessing what they never saw before — a cycler speeding along past them at ten miles an hour.  This gives such general satisfaction that for some considerable distance I ride between a double row of lifted hats and general salutations, and a swelling murmur of applause runs all along the line.

Two citizens, more enterprising even than the others, have determined to follow me with team and light wagon to a road-side office ten kilometres ahead, where passports have again to be examined.  The road for the whole distance is level and fairly smooth; the Servian horses are, like the Indian ponies of the West, small, but wiry and tough, and although I press forward quite energetically, the whip is applied without stint, and when the passport office is reached we pull up alongside it together, but their ponies’ sides are white with lather.  The passport officer is so delighted at the story of the race, as narrated to him by the others, that he fetches me out.a piece of lump sugar and a glass of water, a common refreshment partaken of in this country.  Yet a third time I am halted by a roadside official and required to produce my passport, and again at the village of Zaribrod, just over the Bulgarian frontier, which I reach about ten o’clock.  To the Bulgarian official I present a small stamped card-board check, which was given me for that purpose at the last Servian examination, but he doesn’t seem to understand it, and demands to see the original passport.