the bottom of the village, I had some difficulty to steer the correct course of conduct. I succeeded, thanks to my efforts to please my mother; and the peasants of Idvor most cheerfully admitted that America must be a fine Christian country, since it had given me a training which harmonized so well with the Christian traditions of Idvor. My presidency in the junior year at Columbia College, my undisputed authority among some of the young aristocrats of New York, and the many scholastic successes in my academic career had sown some seeds of vanity and false pride in my heart. But these seeds were smothered by the inexorable rigors of Idvor’s traditions. Humility is the cardinal virtue in a youth among the peasants of Idvor. Needless to say, the story of my life since I had left Idvor was retold many a time, until my mother and my sisters knew it by heart. It was sweet music to their ears. I enjoyed it, too, because summer evenings in a Serbian garden are most conducive to the spinning out of reminiscent tales. The village worthies spent many Sunday afternoons in my mother’s garden asking many, many a question about America. Tales about things like the Brooklyn Bridge, the elevated railroad, the tall buildings in New York, and the agricultural operations of the West were received with many expressions of wonder, but at times also, I thought, with some reserve. A simple peasant mind could not accept without considerable reserve the statement that a machine can cut, bind, and load the seasoned wheat, all at the same time, with nothing but a few stupid horses to drag it along. After a while my store of information became exhausted, and I had much less to say, but the wise men of Idvor urged me to go on. They met my apologies with the statement that peasant Ghiga had never left Idvor in all his life until one day he went to a neighboring village, about ten miles away, and saw the county fair. He returned to Idvor on the same day, and for six weeks he never ceased talking about the great things which he had seen at that county fair. “Just imagine,” said the priest, “how much he would have had to say if he had been nine years in great America!”