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half an hour. I waited to see him, and then he told me his story.
It seemed that he owned some villages near Odessa; but when they were confiscated by the Russian Government upon the termination of the war, he went to live with his mother at Lemberg in Galicia. However, after the exciting scenes amongst which he had lived, the dreary life of the provincial Galician capital was intolerable to him, especially as the small revenue still left to the family was miserably inadequate to support the position of a prince. Accordingly Czetwertinski, who was always an inveterate gambler, scraped together about £3,000 and made for Monte Carlo, with the hope of breaking the bank and restoring his fallen fortunes. In three days at the tables he had lost all but £25; and knowing that I was somewhere in Australia, he went over to London, and took a steerage passage in an emigrant vessel bound for Brisbane. His fellow passengers were such a rough lot that he would not associate with them, and consequently he learned not a word of English during the voyage, eventually landing at Brisbane with one solitary shilling in his pocket. He walked the streets of Brisbane for the first night, nearly starving, and towards morning heard a man speaking a few words of French to another. Czetwertinski went up to him, and found that the man was really a Frenchman—he turned out afterwards to be an escaped communard from New Caledonia—and that he owned a small ten-ton cutter, with which he plied up the coast, carrying provisions to the northern squatters and planters. Czetwertinski took a billet as deck hand to the escaped convict trader, working for his tucker alone; but during his three months' service on board he amassed capital in a sense, for he learned English. His next step was from the deck of the cutter to the schoolroom of a station, where he secured an engagement as tutor in a squatter's family, who little guessed that the quiet Mr. Jules who explained the irregular French verbs to them with exemplary patience was Prince Czetwertinski, the dashing light cavalryman who made his mark at the taking of Alexinatz a few years before.
Meanwhile his mother in distant Lemberg was searching Europe high and low for her missing son, and at last she confided the story of his disappearance to the Jesuits, by whom he had been brought up as a child. Setting the machinery of their vast religious organization to work, the Jesuit fathers in Galicia sent inquiries flying through the ramifications of their order in all quarters of the globe, and at last their brethren in Sydney discovered the wanderer, and placed him once more in communication with his family. They also offered him a post as master in a Jesuit college near Parramatta, and it was during a holiday from his duties there that he came down to Melbourne to see me. His mother longed for him to go home again, and sent him out money, imploring him to return to Europe, which he did soon after I saw him. I had letters from him afterwards, in which he told me that he had resumed his title of prince, and was living in Rome with his uncle, who was a cardinal. He had a special audience with his Holiness the Pope, who took a warm interest in him.
With revenues depleted by continual confiscations, Czetwertinski found himself unable for long to support the social position which he was called upon to fill in Europe, and he accordingly returned to Australia, and for three years held a post as master at St. Xavier's College, near Melbourne. I heard that he was a good teacher, but very harsh with the boys. When he left the school, I got him a post as tutor to the son of a friend of mine at a good salary; but when he had been there a week, there was a race meeting at Flemington, and he got a holiday to come down to town. Now Czetwertinski, though a magnificent rider, knew nothing about racing; but he tackled the ring with the same gay audacity as the tables at Monte Carlo, and with £7 in his pocket commenced a plunge in cash betting. His luck was in this time, and he backed winner after winner, leaving off at the end of the day £300 to the good. Two days afterwards I heard from him that he had thrown up his billet, and was leaving that night for Sydney, en route for Bagdad or Havana! I surmised that he would find his way back to Europe, and eventually marry an American heiress with £20,000 a year, with whom his mother had arranged a mariage de convenance for him, with a promise that £500,000 should be settled upon him on the day of the wedding. As a matter of fact, however, he got no farther than Batavia, where he opened a school, which was a failure. He worked his way back to Cooktown, and thence in a state of starvation to Sydney. On one occasion a butcher's wife, who wanted to engage a tutor, came across him in a registry office, and explained to him that it was usual for people in her country to wear collars. The poor wandering prince had no collar, so he lost the billet. However, he eventually made his way down to Wagga, where he opened a school, which turned out very successfully. He was doing splendidly, and meditating another trip home, when he caught a chill, and died in a week of pneumonia. A Wagga man brought me down poor Czetwertinski's final good-bye, saying that he thought of me to the last. So died as noble, brave, and high-spirited a soldier as ever drew the sword.
Nish, which is close to the Servian border, is one of the most flourishing towns in Bulgaria, and it was at that time fortified by several large forts and earthworks. Many of the houses were extremely handsome, and the villa in which we were quartered was a beautiful residence. A fine Bulgarian church and several Turkish mosques lent stateliness and dignity to the little city that nestles in the valley of the river Moravia. In the evening, as we sat over our cigarettes after dinner, there was a quiet restfulness in the beauty of the landscape that had a special charm; and when my comrades asked me to sing, I would give them that sweet old song, "Sweet Vale of Avoca, how calm could I rest," altering it to local circumstances by substituting "Moravia" for "Avoca."
Routine comes to mould a man's daily life in the Balkans as well as in London or Paris, and before many days had passed we had settled down to very regular habits. After breakfast at eight o'clock, a walk of half a mile took us to the general hospital, where we had a couple of hundred wounded men under treatment; and after going our rounds, and conferring with the head of the hospital about any matters demanding immediate attention, we were practically free by one o'clock for the rest of the day. One day a week was set apart for operations; but on the other days we used to go out riding in the hills and to the surrounding Bulgarian villages, with an occasional coursing match—for hares were very plentiful—by way of keeping our sporting proclivities properly exercised. A very favourite trip was a ride of seven miles out to a famous hot mineral spring, where the water, strongly impregnated with sulphur and chalybeates, gushes out of the living rock in a stream over a foot in diameter at a temperature of 120° Fahr., and falls into a natural basin, largely resorted to by the residents as a bath. Close to this bath, as the afternoon wore on, the deep-bosomed, dark-eyed Bulgarian women would bring the clothing of their households to wash, as Nausĭcaa and her maidens used to do long ago in the fabled land of Phæācia, where Odysseus, shipwrecked on his homeward voyage from Ilium, was saved from the sea. The Bulgarians, like their cousins-german the Servians and Roumanians, are fond of bright colours, particularly the women. Darwin throws the cold light of science on the important subject of feminine attire, when he points out that the gorgeous plumage of certain birds has been developed by them as a special sex attraction to secure for them the notice of a mate. With birds and animals, however, it is almost invariably the male who decks himself out in the most brilliant colouring, hoping thereby to make himself the cynosure of all the eyes of the females; but in the human species, by a curious piece of satire, Nature seems to encourage the female to adopt this gentle art. At any rate the Bulgarian women were adepts at it; and in spite of their Finnish type of features, many of them looked positively pretty as they stooped over the pool in their short, white kirtles of homespun frieze and loose-sleeved scarlet bodices, making a bright note of colour in the picture. And as they dipped their garments in the steaming washtub of Nature's own brewing, these rustic blanchisseuses de fin would sing the plaintive folk-songs of their country in the smooth Slavonian tongue, which had come to them in the old migratory days, during their long residence on the Volga, before the Avars swooped down upon them and drove them across the Danube to the country under the shadow of the Balkans, where they have remained ever since. In the Bulgarian folk-songs, with their plaintive semitones and their melodies sliding away invariably into the mournful minor, one seemed to hear the echoes of the history of the people who have degenerated from the warlike race that crossed the Danube under their great chief Zabergan in the sixth century to the feeble and lethargic tillers of the soil, who have grown up under their long subjection to the great Byzantine Empire with its seat of government at Constantinople, and afterwards to the despotic Turkish power which superseded it.
As the evening drew in we would