After confidential pour-parlers, he explained to me that his nation was in the throes of a great crisis.

As you perhaps know, the gallant little Nation in the Land of the Blue Mountains has had a strange history.

For more than a thousand years--ever since its settlement after the disaster of Rossoro--it had maintained its national independence under several forms of Government.

At first it had a King whose successors became so despotic that they were dethroned.
Then it was governed by its Voivodes, with the combining influence of a Vladika somewhat similar in power and function to the Prince-Bishops of Montenegro; afterwards by a Prince; or, as at present, by an irregular elective Council, influenced in a modified form by the Vladika, who was then supposed to exercise a purely spiritual function.

Such a Council in a small, poor nation did not have sufficient funds for armaments, which were not immediately and imperatively necessary; and therefore the Voivode Vissarion, who had vast estates in his own possession, and who was the present representative a family which of old had been leaders in the land, found it a duty to do on his own account that which the State could not do.