who had been there longer still, people who said that they had lived there always, even before the building of the Slav monasteries, and some of these were three or four hundred years old, as could be proved by rescripts of the Popes. Likewise those who had always lived there reported that some of their own race had been great men--one had been the Palatine of Hungary in the days when King Stephen II. was a child, another was the Palatine Belouch, brother to Queen Helen; and were not the monasteries there to remind one of the leaders, the voivodas, who liked to raise such temples so that prayers could be said for the repose of their souls? It was known that a people which professed the same religion as themselves--"a people of shepherds," as King Andrew II. called them in a decree dated 1222, the time of their first appearance in Hungary--it was known that these Roumanians from Wallachia were just advancing from Caras-Severin, the most easterly of the three counties of the Banat, into Temes, which is the central one. But even if they came farther west it did not seem to matter; one had a kindly feeling for them, since there was a good deal of Slav in their language, and if they were averse from building monasteries, that was their own affair. They had, it was interesting to learn, invited a Serb, the same man who had erected Krushedol monastery in Syrmia, to build one at least as imposing for them at a place called Argesu, to the north of Bucharest. Thus one cannot be surprised that hundreds and thousands of Serbs and Bulgars quitted their native lands--they were not known to the Turks as Serbs and Bulgars, but merely as raia of the province of Rumili--and crossed the Danube, the Serbs going chiefly to their own countryfolk in Banat and the lands to the west of it, while the Bulgars went partly to the Banat, where their descendants have won fame as market-gardeners, but chiefly to Roumania, settling in villages round Bucharest. THE CONSOLATION OF THOSE WHO REMAINED Those who preferred to take arms against the Turk had the choice either of leaving their country and entering the service of one which was at war with Turkey or else abiding in their own land, gathering in bodies of fifty to a hundred men, massacring as many Turks as possible, protecting and avenging their own people, sometimes being killed themselves, otherwise returning to the mountains every spring. The "heiduks," as they were called, had the people's unbounded devotion. Their achievements, perhaps a little touched with romance, were celebrated in the people's songs, and as it may be of interest to know what kind of song this people made in the period of uttermost depression, I give overleaf a couple that are concerned with heiduks; they are translations from a book of mine, _The Shade of the Balkans_, which is out of print. I. Go now and tell them, Tell your companions That, O Heiduk, I have cut off your hands.