population from the Adriatic to the easternmost Carpathians in a few hours. Thus the Military Frontier was originally the outwork of Christendom, the political sea-wall of her provinces painfully reclaimed. But the force of that flood had long been spent—Islâm had ceased to be militant. What had once been a military became merely a sanitary cordon, or was turned to account to protect the absurd tariffs of slow Swabian finance. Nay, it had even ceased in part to mark the boundary line between Frank and Osmanlì. Free Serbia had risen beyond it. It was superannuated—a mere survival. The Military Frontier, as it existed a few years ago, might be compared to an old Roman dyke that once marked the limits of the chafing North Sea, but now runs inland across the flats of Ouse—a monument of a vanquished ocean perverted to hedgerows, given over to the plough. And, indeed, about three years ago it at last struck the Austro-Hungarian Government that this unproductive rampart might be resigned to cultivation; for human culture in the Granitza was at a very low ebb, and the artificial clogs to social development produced industrial depression. Accordingly the military organisation was assimilated to that of the rest of the Empire, and by the _Theilungsgesetze_, which facilitates the transfer of land and the break-up of families, the old communal system has received its death-blow. The Military Frontier has ceased to exist, but the old order of things has not yet passed away; and we were the more anxious to catch if but a glimpse of that antique society, so long artificially preserved from change by the military needs of the monarchy, before it dies away from the memory of man. For to cross the Military Frontier is to survey a phase of society so primitive that it was already antiquated when the forefathers of the English sate among the heaths and fens and forests of the Elbelands. It is to go back, not indeed into Feudal times—for to call this frontier organisation Feudal shows an ignorance of what Feudalism really means—but to wander beyond the twilight of history, and take a lantern as it were into the night of time.