One cannot wonder that Coinica was chosen as the meeting-place of the lords spiritual and temporal of Christian Bosnia. The situation on the one pass which connects the heart of Bosnia and her present capital with the duchy, and the magnificent bridge which here spans the Narenta, make it the key to the Herzegovina; and even the Turks have shown themselves so alive to its strategic importance that on the outbreak of the insurrection one of the first cares of the government was to secure the position by posting here a division of troops, whose tents we now descried on a height above the Narenta, as—after a short and satisfactory audience with the Kaïmakàm, whom we interviewed in a house which he was building on the Bosnian shore—we crossed the bridge, and, entering Coinica, find ourselves in the old duchy of St. Sava. Here, after some difficulty, we have discovered a Han—or rather a loft above a stable—and the attendance is certainly in keeping with the place! We are waited on by a turbaned youth, who is a very good specimen of the untutored savage, as he exists in Bosnia at the present day. He comes into our room and gapes at us while we are eating; he takes up our scrap of wheaten bread—a _bonne-bouche_ which we had brought with us from Serajevo—and fingers it complacently. When we ask for water, this child of nature snatches up the pitcher, and before handing it to us takes a good pull at the spout himself! Since then he has stared at us persistently, with interludes of spitting about the floor. We have hinted in every possible way that he is _de trop_—but to hints our young barbarian shows himself quite unapproachable—till at last all our respect for the sanctity of a host fairly breaks down, and we rid ourselves of our incubus by the magic word _Haiti_!