steamers on the Danube, lying at their quay, with her decks groaning under such a pile of packing-cases and parcels and furniture and all kinds of objects heaped upon each other as almost to make the boat unrecognizable. A lieutenant with a dozen soldiers was sent to investigate, and the captain showed him an order from the Minister of War, commanding that the _Sophie_ should take on board the Military Government in Serbia and transport it to Vienna. But the Buda-Pest authorities insisted on removing all the articles whose ownership the passengers were unable to prove; and it took a whole day to unload the enormous quantities of flour, leather, clothing, poultry, sugar, fats, etc. General Rhemen, the former military governor of Serbia, related that on October 5 he received the order to begin the military evacuation of Serbia. This was carried on day by day, and on October 28 it was completed. "We sent by the railway and by boats," said Colonel Kerchnaive to the Hungarian journalists, "4000 carloads of wheat, 10,000 fat oxen, 10,000 transport oxen, 10,000 pigs, 4000 sheep, 15 carloads of wine, 400 carloads of jam, enormous quantities of wood, of telephone material, of arms, munitions and 16 million crowns in silver." Such was the "military evacuation" of Serbia.... And at the beginning of the same month, when the whole Austro-Hungarian monarchy was in a state of collapse, Baron Hussarek stood up in the Reichsrath and said that "the task will arise for the Government carefully to prepare and inaugurate the difficult but hopeful work of reconstructing the monarchy on the basis of national autonomy." The imperturbable Prime Minister announced that "we shall have to go to work and set our house in order." But you will say that the Baron was a futile Mrs. Partington, an isolated antagonist of the inevitable, and only mentioned here for the sake of dramatic effect. Not at all! So far from being laughed at everywhere as an absurd reactionary he was held in the highest Buda-Pest circles to be a perilous innovator. He actually spoke about conciliating the Austro-Hungarian Slavs: not so Count Tisza. "What is happening in Austria," exclaimed the grim Calvinist a few months before, "are strange, grotesque displays of the ridiculous symptoms of the presumptuous mentality of people of no importance." (b) IN SLOVENIA