At midday and past, when the sun blazed overhead, the air was thick with dust and rich with billy-goats, and the bulls were roaring and the stallions squealing insults at each other, the people who had finished eating hot sausages in the sun thought it an admirable opportunity for beginning to dance. The bagpipe man appeared, and struck up at once one of the odd monotonous airs for the "kolo"; men and women joined in a long line, each holding the next at arm's length by the sash, and were soon serpentining in and out and round and round, surrounded by a suffocating crowd of lookers-on. The Albanian was showing off a roan stallion, a red-hot beast, which he managed beautifully almost entirely by his knees. Its apparent docility tempted a young officer to mount. He picked up the curb, drove in his spurs, and in another moment the squealing, plunging animal was in mid-air, over the dancers. The scattering was great, the roan appearing at intervals high above the crowd. No one was hurt, the interruption was only temporary, but the roan did not change hands that time at any rate. Nothing will stop a Servian from dancing the kolo. All the animals had been supplied with green forage, for the Servians are kind and careful of their beasts, and now the draught oxen were being taken in detachments to the river to drink. As each pair of oxen returned from watering, it was yoked and set off on its homeward journey, till there was a processional frieze all along the road. The market slowly dissolved, and by four o'clock there was not much of it left but débris on the field. Nish is a bright and attractive town, with about 20,000 inhabitants. Two slim minarets show that it was once Mohammedan, and a fat new church, bloated with cupolas, proclaims its orthodoxy. The buffalo carts in the streets, the variety of peasant costume, the wild luxuriance of crimson roses in the Park, the pretty wooden trellis bridge over the river, the number of houses still remaining with screened windows, the silver filigree workers and the veiled women give it picturesqueness and a dash of the Orient; but you must not tell it so, unless you wish to hurt its feelings. If a long pedigree be a claim to respect, Nish deserves much; for Nish, as Naissus or Nissa, existed before Servia, and quite early in the Christian era was a considerable town in Upper Moesia. It claims to be the birthplace of Constantine the Great, and the claim is very generally admitted. Constantine's mother, the celebrated St. Helena, the discoverer of the True Cross, was the daughter of an innkeeper at Naissus, while his father was of "Illyrian" blood. I looked with interest at the Albanians who cantered through Nish with a lot of half-broken ponies, and with interest also upon the stout daughter of the inn, but I did not feel that either were destined to disturb the balance of Europe.