What a contrast when you return to Sofia! It is a day's journey in the express--a very short time, far too short to efface the vivid impression on the senses made by Constantinople. Perhaps in one respect Sofia resembles the great city, in that it is overcrowded. Arriving at night, you are lucky to share a room with a Bulgarian officer. The latter is lying in bed, and does not seem perturbed at a civilian being put into his room. Perhaps he has been staying a long time without paying, and the management is retaliating. There is a bed which has sheets which may have been laid fresh for a German officer in 1915, and you wisely follow the custom of the country and sleep with your clothes on. Next day, when you step out on to the streets of the Bulgarian capital, your eyes almost refuse to take in the change. You have such a strong expectation of the moving picture of the Constantinople street that you feel, as it were, robbed and astonished, as by a spell cast over your world. You have been transported by enchantment to an entirely different scene. Here is a strange quiet. A peasant population has come to town in heavy clothes and heavy faces. Despite the war and all the trouble it has meant, there is a feeling that all able-bodied men and women are provided for. Here is none of the elegance and indolence of Athens, or of the ingenuity and cleverness of Constantinople, but a steadiness and drabness of a peasant clumsiness mark the new Sofia. It is neither so pleasant nor so promising a place as it was in 1915. The soil of the black years is upon it. Sofia was a peasant city without much fashion or style then, and this aspect has intensified itself. The peasant is the born enemy of the town, and whilst he may be perfect in the country he is a boorish and non-comprehending fellow when he comes to the capital to rule. The peasant in power has very little use for the brighter side of civilization. The more the latter is cut down the better for him. He has, unfortunately, grasped the truism that "without the peasant nothing can exist," and he is much disposed therefore to take more of the profit of living for himself and cut down the expenses of civilization. In Bulgaria we have the curious anomaly of peasant communists in political power and a king. Monarchy and a sort of Bolshevism. "So you are all Bolsheviks here?" "No, only peasant-communists." "Is that not similar?" "No. We have no international programme. International politics do not interest us. We do not want any more wars. Governments make the wars and the people have to fight them. Ask anyone, Did we want the last war? Do we ever get anything out of wars? No. And now we have an administration who will keep us out of trouble."