Of Karlovac and its inhabitants proper there is little to chronicle except that the inhabitants possess a certain gift of inventiveness; for a report spread through the town in no time that we had walked from Rotterdam for a bet, and the report did all the more credit to the fertility of the Karlovatzan imagination in that it had no particle of foundation whatsoever. The town is divided into the citadel and fortified part, containing the churches, official houses, and a chilling square; and the Varoš or suburb, which comprises the bulk of the houses. There is nothing here of interest; the churches are bare, with the usual bulbous spires; the houses are devoid of ornament, and guiltless of architectural pretensions. They are mostly wooden; but here there are none of the mediæval survivals of an old German town—none of the elaborate carvings that speak of ancient civilization and the taste of old merchant princes. Such relics one does not find in the Sclavonic East of Europe. Karlovac is situated well for trade. She lies on the Kulpa, which connects her with the Savian and Danubian commercial basins, and into which, hard by, debouches the Korana, opening out a valley route into the mountains of North-West Bosnia; while a little above the town the river Dobra performs the same service in the Dalmatian direction. She is situated on the chief pass over the Dinaric Alps, just where the watershed between the Adriatic and Black Sea is lowest. Karlovac is, in fact, the meeting-place of the three high roads which bind the interior of Hungary and Croatia with their seaports—the Carolina-, Josephina-, and Louisa-ways; and a new railway has opened out steam communication with Trieste and Fiume. But despite these advantages Karlovac has no commercial past, and her commercial present, if we except a little timber transport and rosoglio distilling, is confined to the petty huckstering of these peasant gatherings. Her very origin was military. She owes her name and foundation to the Austrian Archduke Charles, chief lieutenant of the Emperor Rudolf in the Croatian military frontier, who began building the town in 1577, and finished its walls in 1582. He planted here a colony of soldiers, for whom, ‘whether German or Hungarian or Croat, or of any other nation,’ he gained certain privileges and immunities from the Emperor,[159] the chief of which was the right to hold in perpetuity any house built here. It was peopled chiefly by refugees from Southern Croatia, then annexed by the Turks, against whom in 1579 the still unfinished town was successfully defended. For we are now on the borders of the Military Frontier, the nine-hundred-mile-long line of battle prepared by the Hapsburgh Cæsars against the Infidel. CHAPTER II. THE OLD MILITARY FRONTIER, SISCIA, AND THE SAVE.