It is unfortunate that I am unable to conclude the account of this—to me—uniquely interesting night with the mention of songs and ballads, and that more must be added which it is most displeasing to relate. It is only just to say that, taking into consideration the troubles in the Herzegovina, and—what may have been traceable in the hurried calling-out of the reserve at Dervent and Tešanj—the possible foreknowledge of the imminence of an outbreak in Bosnia, it was quite natural for the Turkish authorities to view with suspicion an assemblage of several thousand Christian Bosniacs, and even to take precautionary measures against any disturbances—or conspiracy. No one can therefore blame the Kaïmakàm of Tešanj for despatching some officials and a retinue of gendarmes to watch the proceedings. This night the Turks had taken their station at the end of the neck of the hill, as if the better to ward off any possible attack, and to secure a line of retreat if necessary. The presence of these Zaptiehs gave me an opportunity of observing how these tools of the Mahometan government dealt with the Christian Bosniacs, when not under the immediate surveillance of foreign consuls. Briefly, they treated them like a herd of cattle; and it is hard to say which was the more revolting, the intolerable insolence or the downright cruelty. I was standing in one of the circles where a Bosnian gleeman was rehearsing a national epic, when the spell of the song was rudely broken by a Zaptieh, who, bursting through the ring of listeners and thrusting the rayahs to right and left, stood before the embers in the middle, and, playing with his cutlass with one hand, demanded, in such a savage tone as quite infuriated me, who would light his pipe. The Bosniacs took it more calmly. The old minstrel laid down his lute and paused for awhile in his lay. For a few moments there was a moody silence—as if some blunted sense of injury had outlived long use of wrongs—then a fine man stepped forward sheepishly and lit the bully’s pipe.