and even meat; but here neither bread, eggs, nor
chickens, which are nearly always procurable, were to be found. Having
received the inevitable 'Nehmur' to every one of my demands, I could not
help asking what the inhabitants themselves eat; and being told that
they lived upon vegetables, asked for the same. Judge, then, of my
astonishment when told that there were none. Fortunately my kind friends
at Bosna Serai had not sent me away empty-handed, or assuredly I should
have felt the pangs of hunger that day.

At all times a khan is a painful mockery of the word hotel, as it is
often translated. Picture to yourself a room about eight feet square,
with windows not made to open, a stove which fills one-third of the
entire space, and a wooden divan occupying the other two-thirds; the
whole peopled by innumerable specimens of the insect creation, and you
have a very fair idea of an ordinary khan. If there be a moment when one
is justified in the indulgence of a few epicurean ideas, it is when
inhabiting one of these abodes of bliss.

About an hour from Schevaleekhan we crossed an arm of the Bosna by means
of a ferry-boat; a little farther on the left bank stands a town of 300
houses, built very much after the same principle as Maglai. Like that
place it has an eminence, around which the houses cluster. This is also
surmounted by a fort with three guns, two small and one large. The Mudir
told me with no little satisfaction that it was the last place taken by
the Turks, when they conquered Bosnia. Profiting by my experience of the
previous day, I took the precaution of buying a chicken, some bread, and
a few more edibles, on my way through the town. Provisions were,
however, both scarce and execrable in quality. Meat is indeed rarely to
be obtained anywhere, as sheep are never killed, and bullocks only when
superannuated and deemed unfit for further physical labour. Chickens are
consequently almost the only animal food known. The method of killing
them is peculiar. The children of the house are generally selected for
this office. One secures a very scraggy fowl, while another arms himself
with a hatchet of such formidable dimensions as to recall in the
beholder all sorts of unpleasant reminiscences about Lady Jane Grey,
Mauger, and other historic characters. The struggling bird is then
beheaded, and stripped of his plumage almost before his pulses have
ceased to beat. The first occasion on which I saw one of these
executions,