industriousness of the real working classes; but in practicability and inventiveness the Oriental is sadly deficient.  On the way out I pause at the bazaar to drink hot milk and eat a roll of white bread, the former being quite acceptable, for the morning is rather raw and chilly; the wind is still blowing a gale, and a company of cavalry, out for exercise, are incased in their heavy gray overcoats, as though it were midwinter instead of the twenty-third of June.  Rudely clad peasants are encountered on the road, carrying large cans of milk into Sofia from neighboring ranches.  I stop several of them with a view of sampling the quality of their milk, but invariably find it unstrained, and the vessels looking as though they had been strangers to scalding for some time.  Others are carrying gunny-sacks of smear-kase on their shoulders, the whey from which is not infrequently streaming down their backs.  Cleanliness is no doubt next to godliness; but the Bulgarians seem to be several degrees removed from either.  They need the civilizing influence of soap quite as much as anything else, and if the missionaries cannot educate them up to Christianity or civilization it might not be a bad scheme to try the experiment of starting a native soap-factory or two in the country.

Savagery lingers in the lap of civilization on the breezy plateaus of Bulgaria, but salvation is coming this way in the shape of an extension of the Eoumelian railway from the south, to connect with the Servian line north of the Balkans.  For years the freight department of this pioneer railway will have to run opposition against ox-teams, and creaking, groaning wagons; and since railway stockholders and directors are not usually content with an exclusive diet of black bread, with a wilted cucumber for a change on Sundays, as is the Bulgarian teamster, and since locomotives cannot be turned out to graze free of charge on the hill-sides, the competition will not be so entirely one-sided as might be imagined.  Long trains of these ox-teams are met with this morning hauling freight and building-lumber from the railway terminus in Eoumelia to Sofia.  The teamsters are wearing large gray coats of thick blanketing, with floods covering the head, a heavy, convenient garment, that keeps out both rain and cold while on the road, and at night serves for blanket and mattress; for then the teamster turns his oxen loose on the adjacent hill-sides to graze, and, after munching a piece of black bread, he places a small wicker-work wind-break against the windward side of the wagon, and, curling himself up in his great-coat, sleeps soundly.  Besides the ox-trains, large, straggling trains of pack-ponies and donkeys occasionally fill the whole roadway; they are carrying firewood and charcoal from the mountains, or wine and spirits, in long, slender casks, from Roumelia; while others are loaded with bales and boxes of miscellaneous merchandise, out of all proportion to their own size.