ia as a young man for participation in
the Albanian league and inciting resistance to Turkish rule and the
decrees of the Treaty of Berlin, he had passed his years of exile in
Newfoundland and India as a priest, and had learned English and read
much. He was the inventor of an excellent system of spelling
Albanian by which he got rid of all accents and fancy letters and
used ordinary Roman type. He had persuaded the Austrian authorities
to use it in their schools, and was enthusiastic about the books
that he was having prepared. His schemes were wide and included the
translation of many standard English books into Albanian. And he had
opened a small school hard by his church in the mountains.

His talk was wise. He Was perhaps the most far-seeing of the
Albanian Nationalists. We stood on a height and looked over Albania
--range behind range like the stony waves of a great sea, sweeping
towards the horizon intensely and marvellously blue, and fading
finally into the sky in a pale mauve distance. He thrust out his
hands towards it with pride and enthusiasm. It was a mistake, he
said, now to work against Turkey. The Turk was no longer Albania's
worst foe. Albania had suffered woefully from the Turk. But Albania
was not dead. Far from it. There was another, and a far worse foe
--one that grew ever stronger, and that was the Slav: Russia with
her fanatical Church and her savage Serb and Bulgar cohorts ready to
destroy Albania and wipe out Catholic and Moslem alike.

He waved his hand in the direction of Ipek. "Over yonder," he said,
"is the land the Serbs called Old Serbia. But it is a much older
Albania. Now it is peopled with Albanians, many of whom are the
victims, or the children of the victims, of the Berlin Treaty:
Albanians, who had lived for generations on lands that that Treaty
handed over to the Serbs and Montenegrins, who drove them out to
starve. Hundreds perished on the mountains. Look at Dulcigno--a
purely Albanian town, threatened by the warships of the Great
Powers, torn from us by force. How could we resist all Europe? Our
people were treated by the invading Serb and Montenegrin with every
kind of brutality. And the great Gladstone looked on! Now there is
an outcry that the Albanians of Kosovo ill-treat the Slavs. Myself I
regret it. But what can they do? What can you expect? They know very
well that so long as ten Serbs exist in a place Russia will swear it
is a wholly Serb district. And they have sworn to