This wretched wind-wry shanty before us, how little does it answer to the richness of the soil! The inmates, like those around, are poor in the midst of plenty. Dame Nature certainly would fain be bounteous; you have only to look at the luxuriant wild flowers that crowd along the garden skirts to see that; they are at least quite as good as the niggard garden patches, themselves half-wild, of sunflower, marigold, and zinnia,—just see! how scornfully yon aspiring tufts of saffron meadow-sweet climb above the paling, or peep between the rickety bars as if to make fun of those cockered garden favourites within! The apples and plums in the orchard to the side are, as such, puny and poor of flavour; but the hedgerow which fences it round is loaded with sloes very nearly as fat as damsons; and as to the rose hips, you might take them for filberts, scarlet-mantled. Further beyond you catch a glimpse of the contours of Mt. Capella masted with oak-woods, now mere pannage for swine, but fit to timber a hundred fleets. The truth is, that the incentives to labour and economy are weakened by the sense of personal interest in their results being subdivided. Even the social virtues engendered by this living in common are apt to run off into mere reckless dissipation. One may think their fruit poor, and their wine abominable; but their maxim is none the less, ‘Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ True, a man has a legal right to lay by his share of the profits; but who does? To do so would be to fly in the face of public opinion, and this Granitza way of life is favourable to the growth and influence of public opinion of a kind. At Radovac there is a well-known yearly market, and the peasants, as we heard from an innkeeper’s son, drink away their whole earnings on this greatest of money-making occasions in the four inns which compose the moiety of this little village. In short, the house-communities have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. One may regret the Military Frontier from an antiquarian point of view. Some pleasant features of this unique society may be lost; but on the whole no one can quarrel with the government for passing that permissive bill which entails its speedy self-immolation.