most ancient Balkan race, there was prosperity and happiness where now is desolation; busy merchants in the seaport towns of Albania, which now are ruins; ships sailing in from Venice with the luxuries of all the world and taking back with them all those good things, a half of which Albania has forgotten how to make? And after that there had been times of friendship with the Serb--Dositej Obradović, the philologist (one of those amiable persons who invented for the Albanians an alphabet), tells us, for instance, how in his travels through Albania he was assured by natives that they and the Serbs lived together as if they were members of one family, while the Kući in eastern Montenegro had, by a gradual process of assimilation, become transformed from Catholic Albanians into Orthodox Montenegrins. It is told that in the wondrous hours when the _čifčija_ gloried in the soil he was about to win, even the notoriously wild Klementi, filled with hunger for the land, ran down from their fastnesses. But, most unfortunately, at that moment the Great Powers decided that Albania was to be an autonomous, hereditary State. This interrupted the movement towards reconciliation with Serbia; and even now the Serbs will be told by many encouraging people that in their efforts to win the regard of Albanians they have an impossible task, that if some of them take a step towards you one day they will rush back a dozen on the day after. These people will repeat the legend that the Albanians have an invincible hatred for the Slavs; but the Albanians have not forgotten how, in the course of the Middle Ages, they were willingly open to Slav penetration--the Serbian language reached to beyond Alessio, the small Albanian dynasties intermarried with Slav ruling families, so that they preferred to speak Serbian, and down to this day two-thirds of the place-names of northern Albania are of Slav origin. One of the most important documents in this connection is a letter from the town of Dubrovnik to the Emperor Sigismund in the year 1434. They inform the Emperor that Andria Topia, lord of the Albanian coast, has secretaries who know nothing but the Serbian language and alphabet. Thus when the Emperor sends him letters in Latin he is obliged to have them translated elsewhere, and the contents of the Imperial letters are not kept secret. So the Emperor was forced to write to Topia in Serbian.... Long memories are not always inconvenient, and Albanian memories are long because, until recent years, all that they knew came from tradition--Austria and Italy had not yet become so concerned about Albanian education that (forgetting their own illiterates in Bosnia and Calabria) the two Allies waved into existence boys' and girls' schools up and down the country; so desirous were they that these founts of knowledge should be patronized that both Italians and Austrians were prepared to pay good money and eke a supply of garments and a