It is said of the Bulgarians that they dislike foreigners, which is true to an extent. Their attention to me on this occasion is to be accounted for in the observation of an historian, that they are ‘a practical people and their gratitude is chiefly a sense of favours to come.’ I was the special correspondent of an important newspaper, and they were anxious that I should sympathise with their cause. They adopted no surreptitious means of making me do so; they went straight to the point and demanded my attitude. I intimated that I had come out to the Balkans to take nobody’s side; I had come ignorant even of the geography of South-Eastern Europe, and intended to withhold my judgment until I had seen the question from more sides than one. They granted that this was fair, and remarked that an honest man who was not a fool must perforce become a bitter partisan on the Balkan question. The day before my departure from Sofia (on this first occasion) I excited the suspicions of a local journalist by declining to declare my sympathies. The reporter intimated that in his opinion a newspaper like mine would hardly send on such a mission a man who was quite as ignorant as I professed to be! They are bold, these Bulgars. This journalist was my undoing. I did not see what he wrote about me until I returned to Sofia, a few weeks later, and found myself completely ignored by the very Bulgars who had been most attentive. Officers who had toasted me when I started for the frontier would not return my salute; newspaper men who had interviewed me now slunk by in the street, and statesmen and politicians barely nodded when I lifted my hat. This was undoubtedly deliberate; the Bulgarians could not have forgotten me so soon. I sought my friend the officer who spoke American, and inquired of him if he knew in what way I had offended his fellow-countrymen. He did not hesitate a minute. The _Vitcherna Posta_, he informed me, had shown me up. The paper had discovered that I had come out to the Balkans pledged to support the Turks, and my pretended ignorance was simply a bluff. The proprietor of my paper, who would probably condemn another man for accepting a monetary bribe, had been bought with a paltry decoration from his Sultanic Majesty. No news but such as was favourable to the Turk and hostile to the Bulgar would be published in my paper. In proof of this statement the ‘Vampire Post’ called attention to the fact that I had paid frequent visits to the Turkish Agency before my late departure. The young officer did not tell me this in the offensive manner of a candid friend; he delivered the accusations straight from the shoulder, and on concluding offered me a native drink, as if I could have no mitigating argument; he was satisfied of my guilt, but when he was in America my countrymen had treated him well.