to bridge over the embarrassing pause by suggesting that
perhaps the letter had never been received, but he waved aside the
suggestion as unworthy of consideration. I gathered from what he said
that royal letters do not miscarry.

"I realize that I am an old man and that my country is a very small and
unimportant one," he continued, "while your President is the ruler of a
great country and a very busy man. Still, we in Montenegro had heard so
much of America's chivalrous attitude toward small, weak nations that I
was unduly disappointed, perhaps, when my letter was ignored. I felt
that my age, and the fact that I have occupied the throne of Montenegro
for sixty years, entitled me to the consideration of a reply."

But we have strayed far from the road which we were traveling. Let us
get back to the people of the mountains; I like them better than the
politicians. Antivari, which nestles in a hollow of the hills, three or
four miles inland from the port of the same name, is one of the most
fascinating little towns in all the Balkans. Its narrow, winding,
cobble-paved streets, shaded by canopies of grapevines and bordered by
rows of squat, red-tiled houses, their plastered walls tinted pale blue,
bright pink or yellow, and the amazingly picturesque costumes of its
inhabitants--slender, stately Montenegrin women in long coats of
turquoise-colored broad-cloth piped with crimson, Bosnians in skin-tight
breeches covered with arabesques of braid and jackets heavy with
embroidery, Albanians wearing the starched and pleated skirts of linen
known as _fustanellas_ and _comitadjis_ with cartridge-filled bandoliers
slung across their chests and their sashes bristling with assorted
weapons, priests of the Orthodox Church with uncut hair and beards,
wearing hats that look like inverted stovepipes, hook-nosed,
white-bearded, patriarchal-looking Turks in flowing robes and snowy
turbans, fierce-faced, keen-eyed mountain herdsmen in fur caps and coats
of sheepskin--all these combined to make me feel that I had intruded
upon the stage of a theater during a musical comedy performance, and
that I must find the exit and escape before I was discovered by the
stage-manager. If David Belasco ever visits Antivari he will probably
try to buy the place bodily and transport it to East Forty-fourth Street
and write a play around it.

There were two gentlemen in Antivari whose actions gave me unalloyed
delight. One of them, so I was told, was the he