Once well out of the city the road is quite good for several kilometres, and I am favored with a unanimous outburst of approval from a rough crowd at a suburban mehana, because of outdistancing a horseman who rides out from among them to overtake me.  At Adrianople my road leaves the Maritza Valley and leads across the undulating uplands of the Adrianople Plains, hilly, and for most of the way of inferior surface.  Reaching the village of Hafsa, soon after noon, I am fairly taken possession of by a crowd of turbaned and fezed Hafsaites and soldiers wearing the coarse blue uniform of the Turkish regulars, and given not one moment’s escape from “bin! bin!” until I consent to parade my modest capabilities with the wheel by going back and forth along a ridable section of the main street.  The population is delighted.  Solid old Turks pat me on the back approvingly, and the proprietor of the mehana fairly hauls me and the bicycle into his establishment.  This person is quite befuddled with mastic, which makes him inclined to be tyrannical and officious; and several times within the hour, while I wait for the never-failing thunder-shower to subside, he peremptorily dismisses both civilians and military out of the mehana yard; but the crowd always filters back again in less than two minutes.  Once, while eating dinner, I look out of the window and find the bicycle has disappeared.  Hurrying out, I meet the boozy proprietor and another individual making their way with alarming unsteadiness up a steep stairway, carrying the machine between them to an up-stairs room, where the people will have no possible chance of seeing it.  Two minutes afterward his same whimsical and capricious disposition impels him to politely remove the eatables from before me, and with the manners of a showman, he gently leads me away from the table, and requests me to ride again for the benefit of the very crowd he had, but two minutes since, arbitrarily denied the privilege of even looking at the bicycle.  Nothing would be more natural than to refuse to ride under these circumstances; but the crowd looks so gratified at the proprietor’s sudden and unaccountable change of front, that I deem it advisable, in the interest of being permitted to finish my meal in peace, to take another short spin; moreover, it is always best to swallow such little annoyances in good part.

My route to-day is a continuation of the abandoned macadam road, the weed-covered stones of which I have frequently found acceptable in tiding me over places where the ordinary dirt road was deep with mud.  In spite of its long-neglected condition, occasional ridable stretches are encountered, but every bridge and culvert has been destroyed, and an honest shepherd, not far from Hafsa, who from a neighboring knoll observes me wheeling down a long declivity toward one of these uncovered waterways, nearly shouts himself hoarse, and gesticulates most frantically in an effort to attract my attention to the danger ahead.  Soon