This is what happened at the shrine. On arriving, each peasant bowed reverently before it, and executed certain mystic passes connected with his religion. He then made his way step by step round the outside of the shrine, moving, as they say, with the sun, from left to right; and if he were particularly pious or particularly conscience-smitten, he stumped round on his knees. On the right or northern side of the shrine a priest standing within it held forth a gilt crucifix, which each passer-by kissed; and having performed the circuit of the exterior, each votary entered the shrine itself and completed his devotions before barbaric pictures of his divinities which were facing east—laying, it might be, on the altar a homely nosegay of rosemary and golden zinnias. Many devotees, after leaving the mysterious canopy, remained facing it outside, as represented in the sketch, on their knees, counting their beads or holding out their clenched fists in a peculiar attitude, intended, perhaps, to represent a cross. Some prayed very earnestly; and indeed the occasion was no ordinary one. When each had finished, he left the immediate neighbourhood of the shrine and joined the multitude below, so that the grassy slope around the building, which was a rude wooden shed, was reserved for those actually performing their devotions. This sketch was drawn on the eve of the festival, when the shrine was less crowded. But what was most striking was the thoroughly Mahometan appearance of so many of these Christian devotees. The influence of Islâm seemed to have infected even their ritual; for many grovelled on the ground and kissed the earth, as in a mosque. There was one man whom I should have mistaken for a Hadji or Turkish pilgrim; there were others with the shaven crown of a true-believing Moslem, and the single pig-tail, so thoughtfully preserved by the Faithful to aid the Angel Gabriel in dragging them into Paradise. There were women with faces so nearly eclipsed that they seemed in fear of the injunctions of the Koràn; and even the monks who had come up from the monastery of Comušina might be mistaken at a little distance for Turkish officials. There was something pathetic in the sight of so many Christians, dressed indeed in the garb of Mahometans, but still clinging to the faith of their fathers![175] Indeed, the whole scene was one which, though well-nigh impossible to describe, no one who had seen it could ever forget, and in which even those who lament the superstition must acknowledge some elements of grandeur and beauty;—the solitary mountain-peak, momentarily thronged by pilgrims who in some childish yearning after heaven had pitched their place of worship here so as to be nearer their celestial goal—the votaries themselves—these poor peasants, brutalised by centuries of misrule, steeped in ignorance and bigotry, outcasts of this world rapt in silent communings (as they believed) with