The moment was critical, for communications had been passing between Servia and Montenegro for an alliance and a declaration of war against the Sultan, for which the entire population of the principality was impatient, and when I arrived the rumor had begun to spread that Servia had yielded to diplomatic pressure and would decline the alliance. The young Montenegrins were chafing, and the old men complaining that the young ones were growing up without fighting and would be nerveless. The Prince was very guarded, but it was easy to gather from what he said that he neither could nor cared to restrain the people from going in limited numbers, and in an unobtrusive way, into Herzegovina to fight the Turks, and in fact he was perfectly within his rights to send his army there, for, curious as it may seem, the Turkish government had never terminated the _de jure_ state of war with the principality, or acknowledged its independence, and the fighting in the vicinity of Niksich had been going on in an intermittent way for more than three hundred years, during which the city had been in a small way in as close a state of siege, probably, as Troy was for ten years. As to operations in Herzegovina, small bands had been going and coming, concentrating when there was a movement to be made by either combatant, and slipping back across the frontier when they had had a brush, but all _sub rosa_. The Prince, Nicholas, is personally a prepossessing man, and it was a good fortune which permitted me to study him and his people at a time when the primitive, antique virtue of the little nation had not been deteriorated by civilization, for it was then a pure survival of the patriarchal state, holding its own in the midst of an enslaved condition of all the population around. He is a man of large mould, of a robust vigor which gave him a distinct physical preëminence amongst his people, with the effusive good humor which belongs, as a rule, to large men, and a hearty _bonhomie_ which with that simple people was a bond to the most passionate devotion. He is quick-witted and diplomatic, with a knowledge of statecraft sufficient for the elementary condition of government over which he presided; and his subjects were not then so many that he did not know by name every head of a family amongst them. He could give you off-hand the genealogy of each of the families which had, after the defeat of Kossovo, taken refuge in the Bielopolje, the central valley of the principality, from the defeat of Dushan down, and he knew all the traditions of their early history. When the young men played at games of strength or skill, there were few who could pitch the stone so far or shoot so well, and perhaps those few had the tact not to let it be seen, so that he stood amongst his people as the model and type of all the heroic virtues. In spite of his great physical proportions he was nervous and excitable. In all but military abilities he had grown