But the sun is sinking low in the heavens, and it is high time for us to be again on our legs. We now made our way across the southern slopes of the summit, or rather table-land, of Vučia, which forms a lovely Alp or mountain pasture. At intervals we came upon peasants of the type we had seen the evening before (we had met with no human being in the intervening day) tending kine, or mowing hay. When, however, we approached some women—who, being unveiled, we assumed to be Latin Christians—to ask the bearings of Travnik, they rushed away into a thicket screeching, ‘_Hai ’ti! hai ’ti!_’ ‘Off! off!’ so Moslemized—if indeed they were rayahs, as we think certain—were their ideas of propriety! One of them had made a sign which we mistook for an answer to our enquiry, and against our better judgment we followed the direction indicated, and which afterwards turned out to be hopelessly wrong. Meanwhile, our lines had fallen in pleasant places. The fresh scent of hay was delicious; the soft undulating mountain lawn, dotted with magnificent beeches, kept perpetually recalling a fine English park; on one side, too, it was appropriately fringed by a fir-plantation of Nature. It was quite hard to realize that we were far from any town or even shelter. In the midst of these loneliest of mountains one kept half expecting to catch sight of the cosy red gables and mullioned windows of some old Elizabethan mansion. The beeches seemed to have caught the inspiration of the landscape. In the freer atmosphere of these glades they had lost the almost poplar-like procerity of their forest-growth, and expanded into that more pear-shaped outline which is so congenial to genteel precincts. Over those forest depths through which we had been diving all the day had reigned the ‘silence of the central sea,’ but these woodland coasts and islands were alive with garden songsters—tits and wrens and blackbirds—fluttering about in the golden sunshine of evening, and filling our ears with familiar home melodies.