But word had been sent before by our friends the patriots, and we only caught a glimpse of one insurgent, and saw one dead Turk, a victim of the last skirmish, whose body the garrison had not dared come out to bury.
We brought the first news the pasha had received in five days.

He gave me, for official information, his version of the late fight, in which old Peko had drawn a convoy of provisions into an ambush and captured it, killing eighty men of the escort, whose heads one of my colleagues had seen stuck up on poles at the insurgent camp, but in which the pasha admitted a loss of only twenty or thirty men.

I had seen many Turkish pashas, but never one of that type,--amiable, lethargic, and quite indisposed to do any harm to anybody, and he could not understand why the insurgents could not let him alone; he did not want to disturb them.

He complained bitterly that ill-disposed people had been stirring up the population of his province and that, though he had a force of two thousand men, the disorderly Herzegovinians made it very difficult for his men to go about.

It was really pathetic to hear him.