serious
politician. There are no drones, and none who spend their lives
in the pleasures, refinements, luxuries, vices, the idle
amusements of the great cities of Europe. The buildings
represent utility, means fairly adapted to ends, but with no
cumbrous decoration or ponderous display. These capitals are
bureaucratic settlements, devoted to the deliberate ends of
national government with a minimum of waste, strictly
appropriated to use alone, rendering their service to the nation
as a counting-house renders its service to a great factory.
Peasants walk their streets in brilliant village dresses. No one
thinks a rational country costume inappropriate to the pavement
of the capital. This is an index to the idea of purpose which
pervades the town; there is none of the sense that a different
costume is needed for urban life, an idea which arises from the
association of towns with pleasure and display.

[Illustration: BLESSING THE LAMB ON ST. GEORGE'S DAY]

"Few sights can be more inspiring to the lover of liberty and
national progress than a view of Sofia from the hill where the
great seminary of the national church overlooks the plain. There
at your feet is spread out the unpretentious seat of a
government which stands for the advance of European order in
lands long blighted with barbarism. Here resides, and is
centred, the virile force of a people which has advanced the
bounds of liberty. From here, symbolised by the rivers and roads
running down on each side, has extended, and will further
extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of
science and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia
stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the
Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new
embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom
of mind, the great cathedral, with its vast golden domes
brilliantly standing out from the shade behind them. In no other
capital is a great church shown to such effect, viewed from one
range of hills against the mountainous slopes of another. It is
a building which, with its marvellous mural paintings, would in
any capital form an object of world interest, but which, in the
capital of a tiny peasant State, supremely embodies that breadth
of mind which

"... reje