"In America, everybody swear--no make trouble to say: good-morning your--Highness. See a man--slap him on shoulder and say: Hello--John--you--how dy? So long, then, you--old man, good-bye." The butter and egg man gripped my hand mightily, and as a parting word gave me this injunction. "Don't let your old woman boss you;" then, glancing at our prophet, he added: "He little not all right." The Roumanian shepherd looked out the window and made no effort to take my proffered hand. His sallow face was drawn by pain, caused by something I dimly divined. We were at the station, a station famous for a certain kind of sausage, whose odorous steam soon filled our nostrils. Taking several portions from the tray which a waiter held towards me, I gave them to the Roumanian peasant. Like a wild beast he fell upon the food, while into his pain-drawn face came a ray of human joy. The prophet had difficulty in making up his mind about me. Reluctantly he stretched out his hand as I was leaving the car. When I grasped it, he querulously asked: "Have you received the Blessing?" and with great assurance I answered: "You bet." VI THE DOCTOR OF THE KOPANICZE The last people to feel the sweep of the tide which carried them to the United States and back again were the mountain folk in Eastern Europe. The Slav is naturally a plainsman, and even in the lowlands, where he could not very well escape the force of world currents, he resisted them as long as possible, content to follow his plough for a meagre wage. When at last the lure of the gold grew too strong for him to withstand its seductive beckoning, he went first from the great highways along the main branches of railroads, and from villages on the shores of rivers; until the ever-rising tide, with all its volume and all its good or ill, reached the mountains. Where in straggling villages in the Carpathians the little mud-huts are detached, and scattered on top of the foothills in the midst of their stony fields, these form a Kopanicze; the individual hut is called a Kopanicza, and the inhabitants are called Kopaniczari. They are the poor mountain folk, isolated from church and school, far from the highways of travel, and are among the most backward, most primitive, and most neglected of the Slovak people. Their isolation has often bred not only ignorance but sometimes lawlessness, and, even now, he who has no pressing business there, avoids these settlements.