As though in indication of his intention to be silent, he closed his mouth firmly. It was a strong mouth and could shut with finality. Everything about him expressed strength and determination mixed, as these qualities often are in the highest type of American business man, with gentleness, good nature, and modesty. I liked his looks. He was the kind of man you would pick out to take care of your watch and pocketbook—or your wife—in case of emergency. I wanted him to go on talking, and said so, and when both the other men backed up my request, he began in a spirit evidently reluctant but obliging: “For some years before the outbreak of this war,” he said, “I represented a large American oil company in southeastern Europe, where we had a considerable market. My headquarters were at Vienna, but my travels took me through various countries inhabited by people of the Serb race, and I found it advantageous to learn to speak the Serbian tongue, both for business reasons and because I enjoyed making friends among the people. In order to practice the language and form some knowledge of the people, I made it a custom, when traveling, to stop at small hotels used by the Serbs themselves, in preference to the more cosmopolitan establishments; or, where the small hotels were not clean, I would sometimes take a room with some Serbian family. ”In Bosnia there was one very attractive little city to which I was always particularly glad to go. It was a place of thirty or forty thousand inhabitants and lay in a lovely, fertile valley among the hills; and you may judge something of it by the fact that the Serbs coupled the adjective ‘golden’ with the town’s name. Not one American in a thousand—probably not one in a hundred thousand—had ever heard of the place then, yet it was the capital of Bosnia. The Austrian governor of Bosnia had his palace there, and the life of the place was like that of some great capital in miniature. One thing about the town which interested me was the way in which its people and its architecture reflected Bosnian history. In the first place there were many Serbs there, the more prosperous of them dressing like conventional Europeans—except that the fez was worn by almost all of them—and living in low, picturesque Serbian houses, with roofs of tile or flat stone shingle; the rest peasants in the Bosnian costume, who came in from the outlying agricultural regions. But also there were Mohammedans—leftovers from the days of Turkish dominion—and the town had minarets and other architectural signs of the Turk. And last there were the Austrians—the Austrian governor, Austrian soldiers in uniform about the streets, Austrian minor officials everywhere; and in new buildings, parks, and boulevards, Austrian taste. For, after taking Bosnia, under the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878, the Austrians, knowing well that their grabbing policy was criticized, went to some pains to beautify the Bosnian