Thus Tino the Undecided on his quondam Allies, who from time immemorial were held by the Greeks to be barbarians pure and simple. The taxes of Stambuloff and the sophistication of Ferdinand may have sufficed to convert Sofia from a city of sewers and filthy mosques to a modern capital with electric light and tramways, gardens, museums and broad boulevards, but a quarter of a century has not changed the heart or the outlook of a single Bulgarian peasant. The whole of Bulgarian literature, until the last twenty years, was comprised in those folk-songs which have perpetuated the Bulgarian spirit and nationality. Chief among them are the lays of the heroes, and upon these heroes the character of the Bulgarian peasant of to-day is modelled. One of these heroes, having been bantered by his drinking companions on account of an unnoticed blemish on the fairness of his lady, goes home and kills her for the fault. Another drags his mother round the house by the hair of the head because he came home unexpectedly and found no meal prepared for him. A third, who had killed his paramour because she was losing her beauty, was gently chidden by his mother, who represented that the victim would have done good work in the scullery. In short these heroes, whose exploits are sung in every village of Bulgaria to-day, are as unmitigated a lot of cruel scoundrels as ever constituted a comitadji band. Foremost among them is the national hero Marko, whose extensive drinking bouts are the only stories that can make a Bulgarian smile. Among his nobler exploits are the abduction of a Turkish princess, who bores him so unutterably that he has her killed by his band. She had contrived his escape from captivity, and upon this charming legend is built up the Bulgarian tradition of gratitude. Such legends are “the gems of our literature,” says Slaveikoff, the Bulgarian poet. The fact that for five hundred years they have been the only Bulgarian literature accounts for the circumstance that Ferdinand was called to rule over a race whose ethics were those of the fourteenth century, and fairly barbarous ones at that. The land inhabited by this survival of mediæval barbarity is the ancient Scythia, the Siberia of the Roman Empire. From time immemorial it has been the cockpit of Eastern Europe, a land given over to slaughter and an infinite succession of dark deeds. It has taken on the aspect of its history, and the traveller through its gloomy plains and forbidding mountains can well sympathize with the culprits of ancient Rome, who were banished from smiling Italy to this frowning solitude.