But we must leave Slavonia for the present, and transport ourselves back in some aërial fashion to Karlovac, from which town we are about to make our way to Siszek by the last strip of railway we were to see for many a long day. It may be that it was lucky that such a means of transit was still at our disposal, since, if we had been obliged to foot it, we must have run the gauntlet of a band of robbers then infesting the country near Petrinia. As a rule our Croatian friends were never tired of assuring us that it was beyond the frontier that these gentry flourished; and the hilly country that rose to the south-west—the Kraina, as the promontory of Turkish territory is known, which acts as a thorn in the side of Austria—was pointed out as a regular asylum for wild characters, and in fact was long the only part of the frontier where the watch-service was still needed. At the present moment, however, even the Croats were fain to admit that Bosnia was free from robbers, while their own country was insecure; and, indeed, I am afraid that this was not such an exceptional state of things as they would have had us believe, for when we arrived two days later in the Slavonian lands of the lower Save we found the whole country under martial law, owing to the murderous infestations of brigands in the Syrmian highlands; and though several had been hanged, the reign of terror was such that the military government was still continued. Indeed, just after the Austro-Prussian war, the state of Croatia had become so deplorable by reason of the increasing brigandage, that ‘Standrecht’ had to be proclaimed there, and no less than forty robbers were hung. For some time a gibbet with its ghastly appendages was to be seen from the train on nearing Agram.