Each day of my life seemed stranger than the last, and I wondered how much longer this one was to be, for I had begun it at 4 a.m. When at 9.30 they arose and wished me good-night, I was more grateful to them than for anything they had yet done for me. Towels, curtains, bed linen, all were pious offerings to the monastery. Each was embroidered with the donor's name and a motto, and the cushions were covered with beings who looked painfully like Cupids but were doubtless Cherubim. But none of these interesting facts did I discover till the next morning, when the monastery bell clanged loudly at four o'clock and woke me up. I struggled with a desire to sleep for several days, but as I had to see the church, draw it, and ride to Rashka, I got up at five and went out into the corridor. All the land was hidden in a dense white mist. The moisture clung clammily to tree and wall, and fell heavily, plap, plap, to the ground, and I shivered in a thin cotton shirt. Nikola appeared almost immediately with coffee and milk and bread, and my pandur with my coat, and, by the time I had breakfasted, the Archimandrite was waiting below to show me the church. The old man unlocked the door, and he, I, and the pandur went in. We entered a narthex, a late addition to the church which spoils its proportions, and saw before us the original west front of the building, all of pure white marble, and the exquisite doorway--a square-headed door surmounted by a lunette with the figure of the Virgin between two angels in high relief, and framed with the most delicate mouldings upon which the fanciful monsters and arabesques of Byzantine art interlace, and the invention and execution are alike perfect. A small detached pier standing upon the back of a grotesque beast, as in the early churches of the North Italian towns, stood on either side of the door and supported the projecting upper mouldings; but they have both been sadly mutilated, for the Turks occupied the Imperial monastery (Tsarska Lavra) and stabled their horses in its church. To do them justice, however, they did not treat the building more cruelly than our own countrymen treated our own cathedrals, and much of the carving is as clean cut as when Stefan Nemanja raised it, in 1190. The Archimandrite sighed over the mutilations, but was pleased at my delighted appreciation of his church. We passed into the old building, through the little old narthex, into the body of the church. This is entirely frescoed, but the paintings are all newly restored, except those just inside the door, where great figures of weird Byzantine ascetics, the hermit saints--Onofrio, Marcus, Peter Antony, and Alexis--show grimly in the original fresco, and a rude painting of the Last Supper with fragments of some other subjects still cling to the walls. The north and south doors have also been beautiful, but they have suffered more severely than that of the west. Of the