n its physical
characteristics to the Blue Ridge Region of our own South, with the same
warm summers and the same brief, cold winters, peopled by the same
poverty-stricken, illiterate, quarrelsome, suspicious, arms-bearing,
feud-practising race of mountaineers, and you will have the best
domestic parallel of Albania that I can give you. Though during the
summer months extremely hot days are followed by bitterly cold nights,
and though fever is prevalent along the coast and in certain of the
valleys, Albania is, climatically speaking, "a white man's country." Its
mountains are believed to contain iron, coal, gold, lead, and copper,
but the internal condition of the country has made it quite impossible
to investigate its mineral resources, much less to develop them. With
the exception of Valona, which has been developed into a tolerably good
harbor, there are no ports worthy of the name, Durazzo, Santi Quaranta,
and San Giovanni de Medua being mere open roadsteads, almost unprotected
from the sea winds. There are no railroads in Albania, and the
indifference of the Turkish Government, the corruption of the local
chiefs, and the blood-feuds in which the people are almost constantly
engaged, have resulted in a total absence of good roads. This condition
has been remedied by the Italians, however, who, in order to facilitate
their military operations, constructed a system of highways very nearly
equal to those they built in the Alps. Though the greater part of the
country is a stranger to the plow, the small areas which are under
cultivation produce excellent olive oil, wine of a tolerable quality, a
strong but moderately good tobacco, and considerable grain; Albania, in
spite of its primitive agricultural methods, furnishing most of the corn
supply of the Dalmatian coast.

Albania, so far as I am aware, is the only country where you can buy a
wife on the instalment plan, just as you would buy a piano or an
encyclopedia or a phonograph. It is quite true that there are plenty of
countries where women can be purchased--in Circassia, for example, and
in China, and in the Solomon Group--but in those places the prospective
bridegroom is compelled to pay down the purchase price in cash, not
being afforded the convenience of opening an account. In Albania,
however, such things are better done, a partial payment on the purchase
price of the girl being paid to her parents when the engagement takes
place, after which she is no longer