horses was one of the most crying wrongs of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian rayahs, and one of the many causes of the revolt. How inveterate must be that misgovernment which continues to sow the wind at the very moment that it is reaping the whirlwind! Here, at least, affairs are becoming hourly more ominous. We hear tidings of a Christian victory near Novipazar, which means that the single road connecting Bosnia with the rest of Turkey is seriously threatened. Isolated tales of bloodshed and massacre form the common topic of conversation. A Serb cuts the throat of a Turkish Mollah near Mostar; the Christian is hanged; his friends surprise a party of Mahometans in an inn, and massacre them to a man; the cry for vengeance is now caught up by the Turks, and so the tragedy developes. Such details are revolting, but they give a true picture of the reign of terror which is setting in. To-day a large number of Austrian women, the wives of artizans beyond the Save, are leaving the town. This evening, our last in this city, a strange atmospheric phenomenon seemed to shadow forth the uncertainty of all around. In the afternoon it began to pour, and at first the clouds, as they shifted hither and thither, threw the mountains, that frown around the city on every side, into strange and novel reliefs. Then they sank lower, till they hung like a pall above mosque and minaret, and shrouded even the ‘nodding hills’ around in impenetrable gloom—half cloud, half mountain. The city alone stood out with clear and well defined outlines in the livid half-light, but the mist literally lapped its outer walls, and so thickly, that a foe might have approached to the very entrance of the town without possibility of detection. It was, indeed, portentous of the present state of Serajevo; nothing but the present certain; her nearest future overclouded; forebodings of internecine struggles within; the sulphurous vapours of civil and religious war rising around her—doubly awful in the uncertain light of rumour. ‘It is the beginning of the end,’ said a foreign representative to us; ‘do not be surprised if you are surveying the last days of Ottoman rule in the Serai.’ CHAPTER VII. FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE HERZEGÓVINA.