But the next day I was brought from reverie to my senses by the coming of first-class passengers. At Dulcino, the first of the two harbors recently gained by Montenegro, which thus became a maritime state, the Mayor of the town came on board to travel _via_ Cattaro up to Cettinje, the capital, a long way around, but the way of least resistance. _He_ did not break the charm, for a more gorgeously dressed and finer-shaped man one seldom sees. Scores of Montenegrins of the singers and dancers of the preceding evening, cooks and gardeners returning to their homes from Constantinople, where they are in great demand, crowded around this magnate and kissed his hand in true Oriental style, which he took in patriarchal fashion. This was in keeping with the scenes of the day before; but this giant's wife and children were nothing but ordinary, plain people. At the next port, Antivari, a regular European lady, the wife of the Lloyd agent, came on board with the whole population of the village to give her a send-off; and we at once stepped out of dream-land. I now fell into another mood. The whole voyage, with its long and frequent stops, began to seem a regular lark, and I so entered into the spirit of the thing that I determined at the next stop to get my bicycle up out of the hold and get a little acquaintance with the country which lay back of the long mountain line of coast. As we were booked to stop at Cattaro forty-four and a half hours, that seemed a good place to begin. The big Montenegrins had interested me so much I would go up and see where such fellows grew. Who can describe the Gulf, or, as they call it there, the Bocche di Cattaro? It enjoys the distinction of being "perhaps the finest harbor in the world." There is a break in the coast line; as you go in you find yourself in a broad bay; but that is not all; you pass through another opening, into another bay, and so on, the mountains growing higher all the time until, by passing five channels, one so narrow that it used to be stopped by a chain, and so is called to-day Catena, you reach the fifth bay, on the east shore of which, nestled up against the base of a high dark mountain, one of those from which the region Montenegro got its name, lies Cattaro, a town of five or six thousand inhabitants, the outpost of Austria to the south. For a brief period at about the end of the Napoleonic wars, Montenegro held this place and the Bocche. No doubt all Montenegrins long to possess it again; for it is their natural outlet to the sea, from which the thin line of Austria here shuts them out, except for the poor harbors farther south.