Some of the old men present at these gatherings had taken part in the Napoleonic wars, and they remembered well also the stories which they had heard from their fathers relating to the wars of Austria against Frederick the Great during the eighteenth century. The middle-aged men had participated in the fighting during the Hungarian revolution, and the younger men had just gone through the campaigns in Italy in 1859 and 1866. One of the old men had taken part in the battle of Aspern, when Austria defeated Napoleon. He had received a high imperial decoration for bravery, and was very proud of it. He also had gone to Russia with an Austrian division during Napoleon’s campaign of 1812. His name was Baba Batikin, and in the estimation of the village people he was a seer and a prophet, because of his wonderful memory and his extraordinary power of description. His diction was that of a guslar (Serbian minstrel). He not only described vividly what went on in Austria and in Russia during the Napoleonic wars in which he himself participated, but he would also thrill his hearers by tales relating to the Austrian campaigns against Frederick the Great, which his father upon his return from the battle-fields of Silesia had related to him. I remember quite well his stories relating to Karageorge of Serbia, whom he had known personally. He called him the great Vozhd, or leader of the Serbian peasants, and never grew weary of describing his heroic struggles against the Turks in the beginning of the nineteenth century. These tales about Karageorge were always received at the neighborhood gatherings with more enthusiasm than any other of his stirring narratives. Toward the end of the evening Baba Batikin would recite some of the old Serbian ballads, many of which he knew by heart. During these recitations his thin and wrinkled face would light up; it was the face of a seer, as I remember it, and I can see now his bald head with a wonderful brow, towering over bushy eyebrows through which the light of his deep-set eyes would shine like the light of the moon through the needles of an aged pine. It was from him that the good people of Idvor learned the history of the Serb race from the battle of the field of Kossovo in 1389 down to Karageorge. He kept alive the old Serb traditions in the village of Idvor. He was my first and my best teacher in history.