The enemies of progress and of the "Christian dogs" are receding, and railways and sanitary improvements will come when they are gone. Belgrade was a wretched town when the Turks had it: now it is civilized. Its history is romantic and picturesque, although its buildings are not. Servia's legends and the actual recitals of the adventurous wars which have occurred within her limits would fill volumes. The White City has been famous ever since the Ottoman conquest. Its dominant position at the junction of two great rivers, at the frontier of Christian Europe, at a time when turbans were now and then seen in front of the walls of Vienna, gave it a supreme importance. The Turks exultingly named it "the Gate of the Holy War." Thence it was that they sallied forth on incursions through the fertile plains where now the Hungarian shepherd leads his flock and plays upon his wooden pipe, undisturbed by the bearded infidel. The citadel was fought over until its walls cracked beneath the successive blows of Christian and Mussulman. Suleiman the Lawgiver, the elector of Bavaria, Eugene of Savoy, have trod the ramparts which frown on the Danube's broad current. The Austrians have many memories of the old fortress: they received it in 1718 by the treaty of Passarowitz, but gave it up in 1749, to take it back again in 1789. The treaty of Sistova--an infamy which postponed the liberation of the suffering peoples in Turkey-in-Europe for nearly a hundred years--compelled the Austrians once more to yield it, this time to the Turks. In this century how often has it been fought over--from the time of the heroic Kara George, the Servian liberator, to the bloody riots in our days which resulted in driving Mussulmans definitely from the territory! [Illustration: VILLAGE NEAR SEMLIN.]