Lamentable to record, the day was a Wednesday and the place a public fountain in the street of Travnik. A Mahometan girl, very slightly veiled, was drawing water, when up comes a young fellow with the ostensible purpose of doing the same. He was a gay deceiver!—she might have told it from his roguish look,—but for the honour of Islâm my pen refuses to chronicle the rest. Of course the artless maiden gave vent to a ‘_Haiti!_’ but in a tone so soft, so insinuating, as abundantly to prove that that word of dismissal is capable of as many interpretations as ‘get along, do!’ among certain she-Giaours, and to be the natural prelude to more mutual oglings, and squeezes, and gigglings, cut short by the appearance of an unwelcome third party in the distance—retributive Propriety herself, advancing like a walking sack. Not many years ago a tragic love romance had Travnik for its scene. In the days of the last struggle of feudal Bosnia for her provincial liberties, a young Osmanlì sergeant of Omer Pashà’s army, who was stationed here, fell in love with the pretty daughter of a Bosniac Mussulman, and was betrothed to her. Before they could be married, however, the sergeant fell in battle, and the maiden, when she heard of the death of her beloved, rather than survive him and be forced to marry another, blew out her brains with a pistol. The moral drawn by Omer Pashà, in relating this tragic story, was admirable. ‘It all comes of not wearing the veil, and letting affianced couples see each other. If she had always kept her _yashmak_ on her face she might have married another man, for there would have been no great love in the matter.’[206]