We were in for a night, and had brought no provender, while all the food in camp was the half of an old goat and some flinty ship's biscuit.

The goat was roasted before the camp-fire, laid on a timber platform, which served for bed by night and table by day, and hacked to pieces by the yataghans which had come from the battle two days before.

The meat was tough beyond exaggeration, and the biscuit had to be broken with a stone into small pieces; but we had wine, for this abounded across the frontier and was indispensable.

We heard the story of the fight at Utovu, where the insurgents had been taken in a trap by treachery of the weak chiefs of a Catholic village, and escaped with the loss of only four killed, owing to the precautions of the wily Peko, who, like an experienced fox, never went into a possible trap without seeing the way out of it; but they brought away the visible proofs of their fight in the noses of fifty-eight Turkish soldiers killed.

In the custom of the country the nose of an enemy stands as the logarithm of his head, which is inconvenient of transportation in number; and, though the Prince had forbidden the mutilation of the dead, it was impossible to enforce the prohibition out of Montenegro, and this was the only proof of the actual fruits of victory permitted by the circumstances.
The Italians sang songs, and the whole band made merry till far into the night, when the correspondents, the honored guests, to be served with the best of the accommodations, were shown to the abandoned house of the captain of the village, a stone-built hut, the only one of two stories, which gave us a board floor to sleep on in the upper story, garnished with a bundle of straw for each of us, on which we lay down to sleep, tired to exhaustion.