As it was now near sunset a large assemblage of the neighbouring girls and housewives had gathered together at a spring to draw water and gossip. I found them very friendly, except one old woman, between whom and myself a most unfortunate disagreement arose. The cause of our tiff was that I—being, as the reader may have perceived, curious in pots and pans—so far trespassed on the old lady’s forbearance as to attempt to pocket—not indeed that antique and ponderous utensil itself—but a sketch of the water-pot, which, after duly filling at the spring, she had in just confidence laid down, the better to gossip with her coevals. But chancing to turn round, and seeing the outline of her ‘tikvo’—for that was the name by which she knew it—transferred to my paper, the old woman’s fury knew no bounds; and taking the law of copyright into her own hands, she snatched up the outraged vessel and soused a good portion of its contents over my person. She then emptied out what few drops remained—she would have none of your ‘water bewitched’!—and hastily refilling her pot, left in a huff. It appears that she had taken me for a sorcerer, and had been piously desirous of exorcising the devil within me by a baptism of a rough and ready sort. Her motives may therefore have been honourable to her head and heart, though such misconceptions are sometimes unpleasant at the time. Meanwhile, here is the tikvo, and two other vessels which I succeeded in drawing without any enforced lustrations—one of a gourd-like shape, common in Southern Europe; the other a water-jug like a coffee-pot, of the tinned copper which in Bosnia greatly supplants earthenware. [Illustration: Pots from Tešanj.] There is a sad side, too, to that episode of the old woman in the intense ignorance and concomitant superstition which it reveals. In other parts of Eastern Europe I have met with just the same repugnance against allowing me to take representations of animate or even inanimate belongings. In Wallachia I once nearly felt a peasant’s whip for attempting to sketch his horse. In other parts of Bosnia I have found natives who refused to allow me to sketch them, even when I offered them money if they would let me do so. I can only refer it to a wide-spread underlying belief in the Black Art, and especially that grim outgrowth of Fetishism which our old friend Thomas Ingoldsby places so vividly before us in the ‘Leech of Folkestone.’ The almost universal use of amulets and talismans, of which more will be said later on, is but symptomatic of the same superstition, and its adoption by the rayahs is chiefly due to the same Oriental influences which are traceable, in more ways than one, in their everyday life. While returning to our Han from the spring I witnessed a good instance of the way in which Mahometan ideas touching the seclusion of women have taken hold of the rayah mind.