Reining up his horse upon a slope, he watched the river for a time, flowing there between mountains clothed with forest trees, its blue waters in the vista washing in some places beaches of yellow sand, with pretty, toy-like hamlets sleeping in the sunshine, and then rode in to Semendria, which occupies a low peninsula in the river and is overlooked by a quaint old castle, in remote ages the abode of the kings of Servia, and which has since been taken and retaken, battered and bombarded by Turks and Hungarians in turn. Next morning saw him approaching his destination, the stately city of Belgrade. Towering over its picturesque masses, over the spires and domes of more than a hundred Greek churches and Moslem mosques, steeped in the blaze of the morning sun on one side, and with deep shadows on the other, rose its citadel on the summit of a precipitous rock, surrounded by a lofty wall with flanking towers, a triple fosse, and a magnificent esplanade, four hundred yards in breadth. On the summit waved the Servian tricolour, pale-blue and red together, with the white outside. Around on every side spread lovely gardens. As he approached this famous frontier city, the scene of so many bloody sieges, Cecil could not but smile, in these our days of vast projectiles, at remembering how great a feat it was thought of the Scoto-Austrian Marshal Loudon, when in 1789 he opened his first parallel there, at one hundred yards from the glacis. That stately citadel was the scene of many awful atrocities perpetrated upon Christians, and Cecil ere he left it was shown the place where Rhigos the Greek was sawn asunder limb by limb; and so lately as 1815, thirty-six unhappy Servians, among them the grandfather of Count Palenka, were impaled alive, in violation of a pledge given for their safety. Anxious to return and to be rid of his despatches, Cecil certainly did not loiter, and in a few minutes he found himself traversing the streets of timber-built houses, and those lines of open wooden stalls which compose the shops, the barber and coffee vendor alone having glazed fronts, and where the nationalities are so distinctly marked in the motley population, the laughing shopkeeper in his tiny Servian bonnet, the suave insinuating Greek banker or merchant in his red skullcap, and the haughty, sallow and bearded armourer, blacksmith, or baker, always Turks, as their white turbans show. His national uniform, the time and the cause--news of battle--a great victory over the 'Turkish dogs' by the Morava, spread like wildfire, and Cecil had no difficulty in finding his way to the palace of the prince, or, as he was then universally named, King Milano, which is simply a handsome house with back and front gardens, near the War Office, on the boulevard leading to the Semendria road, which is bordered by double rows of trees.