though I did not know
it, I was, of course, shown only the Great Serbian view of things.
The plan was carefully laid. My guide, who was disguised, spoke
Albanian and some Turkish.

At Berani, our first stopping place, just over the Turkish border, I
met the first objectors to the murders--the monks at the very
ancient Church of Giurgevi Stupovi and a little company consisting
of a wild-looking priest clad as a peasant and with a heavy revolver
in his sash, and a couple of schoolmasters very heavily depressed.
They, too, had evidently expected "something" to happen soon. I
gathered, in fact, that an attack on the Turk had been planned, and
now with this revolution on their hands the Serbs would be able to
do nothing. In the town, however, I met the nephew of Voyvoda Gavro,
then Montenegro's Minister for Foreign Affairs--a decadent type of
youth on vacation from Constantinople, where he was at college. For
the Montenegrins, though always expressing a hatred of all things
Turkish, have never missed an opportunity of sending their sons for
Education--gratis--to the enemy's capital. His conversation--and he
was most anxious to pose as very "modern"--showed that Constantinople
is not a very nice place for boys to go to school in. He was furious
with me for daring to criticize the Serbian murders. He said no one
but an enemy of the Serb people would do so, and threatened to
denounce me to his uncle. Leaving Berani I plunged into Albanian
territory. This land, fondly called by the Serbs "Stara Srbija," Old
Serbia, was in point of fact Serb only for a short period.

The Serbs, or rather their Slav ancestors, poured into the Balkan
Peninsula in vast hordes in the sixth and seventh centuries and
overwhelmed the original inhabitant, the Albanian. But though they
tried hard, they did not succeed in exterminating him. The original
inhabitant, we may almost say, never is exterminated. The Albanian
was a peculiarly tough customer. He withdrew to the fastnesses of
the mountains, fought with his back to the wall, so to speak, and in
defiance of efforts to Serbize him, retained his language and
remained persistently attached to the Church of Rome. Serbia reached
her highest point of glory under Tsar Stefan Dushan. On his death in
1356, leaving no heir capable of ruling the heterogeneous empire he
had thrown together in the twenty years of his reign, the rival
feudal chieftains of Serbia fought with each other for power and the
empire w