kissed her on lips which she did not turn away. The swell of the music, solemn, haunting, and still insistent, filled all the church, even the room in which these two stood, their pulses beating.

66

Come, Clotilde, they shall wait no longer."

He drew her arm within his own, threw open the door, and walked down the dim aisle toward the altar. Some in the shadowed seats said that the groom bore himself with a strange, new dignity.

They knelt at the altar, and Tressilian felt the hand upon his arm tremble a little and then grow firm.

"Fear not, dearest one," he whispered; "it was decreed long ago that it should be."

The clergyman, little and old, scarcely of this world, repeated the marriage service in muffled words, and when he

came to the name of the groom he paused, as if he could not remember, as he had paused more than once before.

"Arthur Tressilian," said Tressilian, in low tones, and "Arthur Tressilian the little old man said after him in tones equally low.

They rose, the two now one, and up the aisle they walked, while the music became loud and triumphant.

In the vestibule the people were gathered and the lights blazed up. There Tressilian paused, and, his bride on his arm, stepped into the heart of the glow. He heard the astonished "Ah!” from all, and then with that old indescribable gesture, a movement that was now full of defiance, he said aloud, for all to hear:

"Friends, I bid you Godspeed; I am about to take my wife home, and we wish no company to-night."

66

TH

HE sunset sky, against which I first saw Belgrade, was like a crimson and orange and purple moth, barred with colors as hard and clear as enamel. Belgrade stood heaped white on its hill, all its windows on fire with light; a long white mound set there in a semicircle above water and a great plain, with a point of land running down into the water.

Beyond the city, as you enter Servia, there are valleys in which the trees grow as thickly as grass; bulrushes tufted with white wool along the rivercourses; great fields of melons, with their dry stalks; and often a kind of English scenery, a monotony of tiled plenty. You come upon cottages surrounded by a hedge of plaited wood; villages with square brown-roofed huts, the roofs edged with white, set in the midst of trees; a little town, into which several villages seem to have joined

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themselves, with its white square church with a red dome. The soil is rich and varied, seeming to yield itself willingly to cultivation. Delicate trees, which I saw when they were yellow and fired with autumn, grow everywhere in irregular clusters. The green and brown plain spreads outwards, full of trees and meadows; long lines and thick squares of trees with meadows between, and a barrier of low hills all round. Servia is a land of contrasts; and beyond Stalatz, where the two Moravas meet, wooded gorges begin, gradually turning to barer and barer rock. The train cuts through the mountains and skirts the bottom of ravines, tracing its line parallel with the streams. Walls of gray granite go straight up into the hard, blue sky, which you can just see above their summits. Even here there is not the savagery of Bulgaria. which the land resembles a little. The great gorge be

tween Nisch and Zaribrod, which may be compared with the Dragoman Pass between Zaribrod and Sofia, is far finer; it is at once bolder and more shapely, cut more finely by nature, and colored more sensitively.

Belgrade reminded me at one time of Moscow, at another of some white Spanish city. The whole place is made by the crossing of straight lines: I never saw a curve. Few of the houses have more than two stories; the streets are broad, mountainously paved; and when I came into it at night there was a white nocturnal silence over everything. There were few lights, few people passing; but by the roadside I saw two gypsies crouching, their faces almost black, the woman's splendid in profile. There are trees in almost all the streets, avenues leading into the open country all round; and, at evening, just as the lights were lit, queer chattering birds like crows began bustling and talking overhead in a language that I have never heard before among birds. Oxen with huge branching horns move slowly through the streets, drawing long, narrow wooden carts; or lie down to rest, as the men do at midday, with their heads on the stones with which they are paving the streets. The town is like a great village ready

made; and one can imagine it being harnessed to those oxen and carted bodily away, and the flat, dreary country which lies all round relapsing into its original dry barrenness.

Yet the place is thriving, and has been so for some twenty years. It is full of merchants, who come to buy plums and eggs and coal; they rush into the restaurant of the Grand Hotel for lunch, eat hastily, and rush out again, much as men do in the City. There are new streets, uninterestingly new, among the older streets, not old enough to be interesting. In the older streets you see the admirable peasant things sheepskins, furs, white serge coats and trousershanging at the windows and doorways of the shops in which they are made; in the newer streets the shops are filled with hideous cheap modern finery. There is one excellent book-shop, in which I saw French and English books - Verlaine's Choix de Poésies; Mallarmé's Poésies; the French version of Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra; Mrs. Meynell's Ruskin. There is a new theatre, which, when I was there, was lit up for Magda; close by is a dingy and half-empty café, in which a few women in music-hall dresses sing music-hall songs; and farther on a sad-faced Damen-Capelle playing string

ed instruments. Few people are in the streets after dark; only, at intervals, one hears the slow creaking of the bullockcarts and the clatter of wheels over the stony roads, and overhead the highslung gas globes, at long distances from one another, start, splutter, go out, and come to life again.

On the edge of the hill, looking over the plain, the river, and Zimony, is a dreary little park, the Kalemegdan, which comes out on a broad terrace planted with thin and sickly trees, each with its little circle of parched flowers around the root. Late at night the park becomes mysterious, with its few gas-lamps; the thick darkness under the trees, which creak slowly; the little turning fountain glittering in a thin pattern in the air; the glimpse down dim alleys, out of which I once saw two peasants, dressed in red and brown and white clothes, like two Giorgione figures, stroll slowly from the darkness and back into the darkness. People walk on the terrace just before sunset, as the sun goes down across a wide, flat, dreary plain, with many wa

ters winding through it, cutting sharp patterns in the plain, and broadening out almost to the aspect of a lake. Below, to the left, are factories, roofs and chimneys rising out of the hill, and, below that, the wharf and the small steamers. After the sun has set, the river grows colder and paler, and the short grass of the plain turns to exactly the color and texture of the Infanta's green velvet dress in Velasquez's picture at Vienna. On the right the river sweeps broadly towards Zimony; you see its spires against a sky which reddens through trailing smoke. And in those moments' effect, in that severe harmony of light and smoke and water, a curious and doubtful charm grows up, out of the literal dreariness of things.

If it were not for the peasants and the gypsies, Belgrade would be a provincial capital and no more; but the Servian gypsies are remarkable even among gypsies, and the Servian peasants are sometimes like savage chiefs, sometimes like ancient Greeks, with their fine, dark, regular faces, black eyes and hair,