But let us be chary of such ill-omened words! and pass on rather to that flowery dell among the beech-trees where the good Vilas are dancing. In form they are as beautiful maidens with ever-loosened zones. Their eyes are blue as the heavens, and their hair, which falls even to their ankles, golden as the sunlight. Some are riding through the forest on wind-swift steeds. They are singing the fates of men; they are weaving destinies; they are watching with motherly tenderness over the slumbers of the heroes of the race, who, lapped in their bosoms, are dreaming on of better days in many a mountain cave, till the guardian nymph shall rouse each warrior from his sleep, to sunder for ever the chains of the oppressors. Methinks they are waking even now! Once or twice our ears were saluted with strange idyllic strains, harmonising with the scenery, and we passed by swineherds recumbent beneath spreading beech-trees, and piping to their bristly charge on barbaric instruments. We chose a shady chestnut-tree by a stream, under which to cook our frugal repast (for though nature was bountiful of blackberries we could not live on them), and while so engaged a shepherd lad came up and serenaded us with Bosnian airs on his rude double pipe or Svirala. We now followed a small tributary of the Ussora, and in its shallow bed made our first acquaintance with the mineral wealth of the country. It was a brilliant mosaic, a medley of vermeiled jasper, snow-white quartz, fragments of rich iron ore, glittering scales of mica, green serpentine; and we picked up a beautiful piece of opaline chalcedony, enwrapping a nest of little crystals in its agaty folds. The hamlet near the point where this rivulet runs into the Ussora is known as Zlatina, which means golden, and is a name commonly given throughout Bosnia to places where gold is popularly supposed to exist; but though there are many old gold mines in different parts, and gold is still washed in some of the rivers, the ignorant peasants are said to mistake sulphur for it, or perhaps more probably the interior of iron-pyrites—our ‘crow gold’—so that the name itself proves nothing.