o was always in the library at the
Sofia Club at tea time, ready to tell how the Dardanelles and
Constantinople could be taken, had learned English at Robert College and
had a son there; the photographer who developed my films also had a son
there--and so on.

Snow-capped mountains rise just behind Sofia, and the brown hills
thereabout, like the rolling plateaus along the shoulders of which the
train crawls on the way down from Rumania, are speckled with sheep.
Sometimes even in Sofia you will meet a shepherd patiently urging his
little flock up a modern concrete sidewalk and stopping now and then for
some passer-by to pick up a lamb, "heft" it, poke it, and feel its wool
before deciding whether or not he should take it home for dinner.

These shepherds wear roomy, short box-coats of sheepskin, with the
leather outside and the wool turned in, like a motor-coat; homespun
breeches embroidered, very likely in blue, and laced from the knee down,
and a sort of moccasin or laced soft shoe. They are as common in the
streets of Sofia as are the over-barbered young snipes in the streets of
Bucarest. On market days the main down-town street is filled with them--
long-limbed, slow-moving old fellows, with eyes and foreheads wrinkled
from years of squinting in the bright plateau sun, faces bronzed and
weathered like an old farmhouse, shuffling down the pavement and into
and out of shops with the slow, soft-footed gait of so many elk. And if
you were designing a stamp for Bulgaria you might well put one of these
hard-headed old countrymen on it, just as in the other capital you would
put the girl in the victoria pattering down the asphalt.

Two newspaper correspondents of the more or less continuous string that
were filing from one Bulgarian leader to another to find out what
Bulgaria was going to do, amiably permitted me to trail about with them,
and thus to see and talk a little with some of those who are steering
Bulgaria's exceedingly delicate course--men whose grandfathers very
likely wore those sheepskin coats with the wool turned in.

None had the peculiar verve and dash of Take Ionesco, but one or two
were decidedly "smooth" in a grave, slightly heavy way, and all
suggested stubbornness, intense patriotism, and a keen eye for the main
chance.

There is little "society" or formal entertaining in Sofia, little
display and little, apparently, of that state of mind which, in
Bucarest, is suggested by the handsome, two-hor