“No,” said I; and after some hesitation I added: “I ran away from the military frontier because the rulers of the land wanted to transform me into a Hungarian; I ran away from Prague because I objected to Austrian Teutonism; I shall run away from Delaware City also if, as your good mother suggested, I am expected to drop my Serbian notions and become an American. My mother, my native village, my Serbian orthodox faith, and my Serbian language and the people who speak it are my Serbian notions, and one might as well expect me to give up the breath of my life as to give up my Serbian notions.” “You misunderstood my mother, Michael,” said the Vila; “she only referred to your notions about woman’s work, and you know that European women are expected to do the hard work for which only men are strong enough.” “Very true,” said I; “the strongest and ablest men in Europe spend the best part of their lives on battle-fields, or training for the battle-fields; this is particularly true of the Serbian people. This forces our Serbian women to do some of the hard work which men should do.” This gave me a fitting opportunity to say a few things in favor of the spiritual influence of the Serbian women by describing the position of the Serbian woman as she is represented in the Serbian ballads--of Chuchuk Stana, the wife of Hayduk Velyko, who urged her hero husband to sacrifice his life rather than surrender the eastern frontier of Serbia, which, during the Serbian revolution, he was defending against vastly superior Turkish forces; of the maid of Kossovo, who at the risk of her life and liberty visited the battle-field of Kossovo in order to administer the last spiritual aid to the fallen and dying heroes; of Yevrosima, mother of Prince Marko, the national hero of the Serbian race, whose counsel and advice were the only guiding star to Marko throughout his stormy life. I told her also that I should not be a witness to that heavenly scene on the banks of the Delaware that Sunday afternoon if it had not been for my mother, who had urged me to go into the world and learn new things, which I could not learn in my native peasant village. Young Vila was much impressed by my Serbian tales, and by my pleading in behalf of the Serbian women, and then she asked me whether I had ever heard of Martha Washington, the wife of George Washington, the national hero of America. I confessed complete ignorance. Pointing to the golden ripples of the sun-kissed Delaware River, she said that it did not always look as bright and peaceful, and then described its appearance when in the middle of winter its surface is covered with broken ice, which, tossed by the waves of the angry river, makes a passage across it next to impossible. But in January, 1777, George Washington, the commander of the retreating American armies, crossed it, and on the other side of the river, near Trenton, surprised the advancing victorious British armies and defeated them,