‘Is it a man’s education?’ he asked. ‘It is not our fault if we have not education; we are learning as fast as we can. It cannot be that clothes make the man. It may be the result of your religion; but I wonder if England is more religious on the whole than Bulgaria is. We hear of horrible social crimes there that never occur here. And our politics is no more corrupt than that of America, which sends us missionaries. We are accused of having national jealousies and ambitions. England is certainly not free from the former, and if she is no longer ambitious, it is simply because her aspirations are all achieved.’ I was unable to define civilisation. When Bulgaria became independent, Sofia was a very dirty town, without a street paved with anything but cobble stones, and with but one house of any pretensions, the Turkish ‘konak.’ To-day, besides a palace and a parliamentary building, there are a national bank, a post office, a military academy, several vast barracks, and many other Government buildings. There are parks and public gardens where bands play on summer evenings; new streets and avenues have been laid out, and some of the narrow ones of Turkish times have been widened; substantial shops and hotels mark the business quarter, and modern homes the avenues. Still, Sofia reminds one of a lanky girl whose spindle shanks and lean arms have outgrown her pinafore. The dwellings, by setting far apart, try to reach out the long new avenues and cover the gawky child, but in places she is absolutely bare. One day I drove out along one of the avenues to call on a Cabinet Minister. The coachman drew up at a modest cottage, whose greatest charm was an ample garden. I repeated the name of the Minister, and looked dubiously at the coachman. ‘Touka, touka’ (‘here, here’), he said, so I entered. A little girl, the Minister’s daughter, responded to my rap and invited me in. The servant was cooking. Not far from here were the humble homes of two painters and a sculptor, upon whom I often called. They were instructors at the National Institute of Art, of which Ivan Markvitchka is the head. But the streets of Sofia have not altogether parted with the past; there are many touches of the old Turkish times left. Many of the shops are dark, low, and dingy, though the shopkeepers no longer block the pavements with their wares and sit cross-legged among them. An ancient Turkish bath and an old mosque stand side by side in front of the market place on the principal trading corner. The bath is not attractive in appearance, but the water is excellent--brought by pipe from a boiling mineral spring in the mountains a few kilometres distant. The place is closed to the public on Mondays, when the garrison of Sofia is scrubbed. Detachments of a hundred men arrive hourly, each with a towel and a bar of brown soap; three-quarters of an hour later they are turned out clean.