The Serb loves to sing; every young countryman carries his gusle, and is ready to use it--a one-stringed violin, shaped something like a mandolin, played on the knee with a bow, like a violoncello. Men and women--peasants and townsmen--all sing. When two or more sing together, it is unison and not part-singing. The national Serb music is rich in melodies. The traveler to-day hears the Serb singing a ballad of the days of Stephen Dushan of Kossovo, of the Bulgar War, of Karageorges (the William Tell of the mountains). The gusle wails monotonously, with an occasional trill on one or two minor notes. Some find its music plaintive, others call it tiresome, and travelers as long ago as the beginning of the eighteenth century have written of seeing numbers of people in a crowd silently weeping as they listened to an old blind man chanting the national songs. There are two great epic cycles--one centering around Tsar Lazar, the other around Marko--and both have to do with the Battle of Kossovo. Fragments of other cycles show that Dushan, Milos Obilich, and other heroes have been each a chief figure in them. No matter how unlearned, from one point of view, a Serb may be, he can always talk about Stephen Nemanya, or St. Sava, or Marko, and the other great men of his race. Moreover, he is continually creating new songs, new folk lore. In the great mills of this country he lightens his work with his simple melodies. Sometimes the words of his song form a clear narration of the events that brought him to America, even of happenings since his arrival. His own sorrows, his own joys, are woven in his epic. After their recent war with Bulgaria, everywhere at village festivals, the Serbs began to sing of their victories, and to-day they are undoubtedly singing of the sorrows of the past two years. Mr. Miatovich says that when as Cabinet Minister he had been defeated, forty years ago, the next day he heard the people singing this event in the streets. Whatever the subject--whether it deals with ancient times or with the present; whether it is an epic or one of the so-called women's songs--the Serbian pesma is anonymous. No single writer or composer claims it. It is the work of the people, all of whom have had a chance to modify it as it has passed through the ages.