When I assured them that there was no more question of their decapitation than of mine, and that they were perfectly safe, they broke into a discordant jubilation like that of a children's school let loose; life had nothing more to give them.

They had no desire to be sent back to their battalions, and they stayed with us, drawing the pay and rations they should have had, and rarely got, when under their own flag.
The scene our camp presented was one to be found probably under no other sky than that which spread over us in the highlands of Montenegro.

The tents of the Prince, the chiefs, and the attachs were pitched in a circle, in the centre of which at night was a huge camp-fire, round which we sat and listened to stories or discussions, or to the Servian epics sung by the Prince's bard, to the accompaniment of the _guzla_, to which the assembly listened in a silence made impressive by the tears of the hardened old warriors, most of whom knew the pathetic record by heart, and never ceased to warm with patriotic pride at the legends of the heroic defense, the rout of Kossovo, and the fall of the great empire, of which they were the only representatives who had never yielded to the rule of the Turk.

Substitute for the rocky ridge which formed the background of the scene the Dardanelles, and the fleet drawn up on the shore before Troy, and you have a parallel such as no other country in our time could give.

Both armies retired to their tents at nightfall, and no sentries or outposts were placed on either side at night; and now and then a long-range skirmish went on, or a Montenegrin brave, tired of the monotony of such a war, would go out between the lines and challenge any Mussulman to come out and try his prowess with a Christian.