During our stay in Sophia the trial was being conducted of the twenty-year-old assassin who murdered the Prime Minister a few months previously. The opposite side of the street from the law courts was daily thronged with inquisitive townspeople, hoping to obtain a glimpse of the boy-murderer, as he was being taken to and from the prison. He was found guilty and executed. A wonderful panoramic view of the city and of the surrounding country, a view that will amply repay you for the almost hazardous carriage ride over worse than miserable roads, may be had from the foot-hills beyond the little village of Dragoleftsky, some eight miles to the eastward. Here you may also get a glimpse, at short range, of how the Bulgarian peasant lives and has his being. You will see the women washing clothes in a crude tub, hewn out of the trunk of a tree, a tub that looks not unlike some kind of “dugout” canoe; while an _olla podrida_ of geese, chickens, pigs and children swarm on the bare floor of the farmhouse. Should you proceed farther into the mountains, on foot, of course, you will come upon one of the enormous monasteries which were the heart and soul of the movement for Bulgarian liberation, and around which most of the fighting against the Turks took place. [Illustration: A BULGARIAN VILLAGE CHURCH.] CHAPTER IX BULGARIA AND HER PAST Progress of Bulgaria—Origin of her Peoples—The Bulgari—First Russian Invasion of Bulgaria—The Assenide Dynasty—Turkish Tyrannies—Emancipation of Bulgaria—Russia’s Intrigues against Prince Alexander—The Late Balkan Disturbances. But now, for a moment, let us look at the serious side of this little warlike principality which has only recently wiggled from under the vassalage of Turkey, at the same time proclaiming her absolute independence, and which, to my mind, is the Bulwark of the Balkans. Although having enjoyed but a short thirty-one years of partial independent existence, for it is the youngest of the Balkan States, the progress of Bulgaria during that thirty-one years has been little short of remarkable. A visitor to the country is at once impressed with the look of indomitable determination that characterizes the features of the Bulgars. That indomitable determination has convinced the outside world of their worthiness of the freedom as a state conferred upon them in 1877; it will continue in the future to convince the outside world of their worthiness of the indefinite prolongation of this freedom.