The assassin is never punished, except by those who take up the blood-feud. If the murder takes place in a town the guilty one escapes to the mountains, or gets away into Macedonia, or into Servia, where he earns his living by sawing firewood. Every few years the Sultan issues an irade “for the pacification of the blood,” as it is put, and the murderer then returns. He pays a small tax to the Turkish Government, after which he cannot be arrested; and if he pays about three hundred crowns to the relatives of his victim, the blood-feud is at an end. This, of course, does not apply to the mountain tribes. They care not a jot for the Sultan or for his irades. There is no law—save that of the blood-feud, the vendetta falling upon the murderer and upon his next male relative. Many were the curious facts regarding the blood-feud and the Albanian laws of hospitality told to me. A case in point was that of a young man named Kol, a friend of Lûk’s, a tall, wiry youth, of somewhat sinister expression—a typical bandit out of a book-illustration. I was talking to Lûk about the hospitality extended by the various tribes to each other when Kol passed, and he beckoned him, saying— “He has just had a curious experience in the Klementi country. Let him relate it to you.” So at Palok’s invitation the young fellow accepted one of my cigarettes, placed his rifle against the wall, and flung himself down upon a small boulder near us. He blew a cloud of smoke from his lips, stroked his knees with his hands, and looked at me with considerable curiosity, wondering why I should want to know his story. “The stranger is interested in your adventures with the Klementi. Tell him all about them.” “Bah!” he said, with a slight shrug of the shoulders. “It was nothing—mere chance—luck, if you like to call it so. There is nothing to tell.” “But what there is interests the Englishman. He is the _Baryaktar’s_ guest, remember,” Lûk remarked. “Well,” said the young man reluctantly, “I was in blood-feud with a man of the Klementi, and went over there to kill him. I laid in wait one evening, and as he drove home his sheep I shot him from behind a rock. He had killed my father, therefore I had a just right to avenge his blood. My shot, however, aroused the whole valley, and I knew that I, the only stranger, would be suspected and killed. Therefore I sped away down the valley in the darkness till I reached a poor little house. An old woman was there, and I craved food and shelter for the night. She gave me food at once—for, like ourselves, the Klementi never send a stranger empty away. I was hungry, for I had crossed into the Klementi region in secret, and dared not seek food lest my presence became known to the man I intended to kill. “Scarcely had I eaten the meat the old woman had given me when there came the sound of voices outside, and to my horror I saw four men carrying the body of my victim.