the manifestations of indignant feeling it called forth is another proof that Russia has lost the confidence of the Servian people.

The Turks, intoxicated with success, and supported by the countenance of their new allies, Russia and Austria, continued their mad career, ruling this haughty people with a tyranny the most oppressive; but though obliged to submit to force, the Servian was not conquered; the impenetrable forests and mountain plateau still remained; and there the brave, the patriotic and the enterprizing, assembled to conspire against their oppressors, and prepare for another campaign, as sanguinary and effectual in its results, as any undertaken by their former chief, Tzerni George. The cry of vengeance found an echo in the Balkan, the Upper Moesia, and the mountains of Bosnia, Herzegowina and Tchernegorai, which sent forth its most valiant Haiducs and Ouskoks as leaders in the new crusade of the Christians against the Turks.

The insurrection, which at first was confined to skirmishing in the mountain passes, with now and then a razia upon the property of some wealthy Turk, gradually spread to all classes of the Servian population; and, as frequently happens in similar revolutions, there was found a chief worthy to be the rival of Tzerni George. This was Milosh, who, though born a swineherd, possessed sufficient bravery and military genius to become the hero of his nation, and the tact and ability to elevate himself to the rank of a sovereign prince; and

if he had possessed one particle of humanity in his brutal nature, exhibited one redeeming quality in his tyrannical disposition, might have lived and died the monarch of a grateful people.

Even his love of absolute power, which led him to trample upon all the social and civil rights of a people so tenacious of their independence, might have been endured in a man whose bravery had achieved so much for the freedom of his country, were it not sullied by an act which has entailed eternal disgrace upon his memory he became the midnight assassin of his relative, friend, and companion-in-arms-Tzerni George.

We have already said, that Tzerni George, having fled from his country when it fell into the power of the Turks, took refuge in Austria-whose prudent Government unwilling to give offence to the Ottoman Porte, and, no doubt, mindful of her own interests, unwilling that such a firebrand of revolt should take up his residence among his Slavonian brethren, her subjects, ordered him to leave her territories, whence he passed into Besserabia, entered the Russian service, became a sort of state prisoner, or rather was placed under the secret surveillance of the Russian police. It was not probable that a man like Tzerni George, in the prime of life, would remain an indifferent spectator of the acts of despotic folly daily perpetrated by his rival Milosh, now in the zenith of power; and as he maintained a clandestine correspondence with his adherents in Servia,

he was enabled to seize the right moment for action, and place himself at the head of the movement which had for its object the dethronement of the tyrant.

However much Tzerni George might have mourned over the fate of his country, which had emancipated itself from the rule of the Osmanli, only to pass under that of one of its own tyrants, his calumniators never accuse him of being personally ambitious. An enmity, the most deadly and unrelenting, against the whole Mussulman race, was the motive that ever guided his actions, whether in the senate or the camp, and now that he had acquired practical knowledge in his intercourse with the world, and perfected himself in the military tactics of Europe, his views became more enlarged; and knowing the indolence, the weakness of the Turkish Government, he conceived the project of emancipating the whole of the Christian population of European Turkey from the rule of the Osmanli. To this end, he was initiated into all the mysteries of the Greek Heteria, which then agitated every part of Turkey in which a Greek community was to be found. This extraordinary fraternity, with its private signals and mysterious hieroglyphics, whose ramifications and secret system has been so thickly veiled, that no government has hitherto penetrated its concealment even to the present day, was now about to be introduced among the Slavonian population of European Turkey, and Tzerni George was the first Servian who had the honour of being elected a member.

The astute Greek, by investing the hero of Servia

with such vast power as military chief of all the Slavon-Greeks, for once showed his wisdom, and proved the inveteracy of his hatred to the Turk, and the steadiness with which he pursued the object he had in view, well knowing he could only hope for success by uniting the robust, hard-fighting Slavonian with his own mercurial race. Still there was an eye upon Tzerni George which never slept; he might hold mysterious conversation with his brethren under the guise of vagrant pedlars and swineherds, he might receive a communination couched in the most common-place language, but conveying information of the highest importance to the cause he espoused, there was still a greater power-the power the priest exercises over the penitent in the confessional, and which the far-seeing Government at St. Petersburg knows how to wield with such advantage. In the civilized West, where the conscience of the revolutionist is not so sensitive as to oblige him to confess the entire amount of his peccadillos, especially if they are political, the spiritual father cannot always lend his aid to the Government; but here, there is ever to be found a sufficient number of devotees ready to unburden their minds, and so divulge sufficient information of what is going forward, as to be intelligible to the ear of the wary priest. This was the case with the hero of Servia; however skilfully he had planned his escape, however secretly, as he thought, he had arrived in Servia, his movements were watched and reported to Prince Milosh, who, by causing the assassination of his rival, became, unknowingly, the

instrument of destroying the most dangerous chief of an insurrection which must have annihilated for ever the empire of the Osmanli in Europe.

The head of the unfortunate chief was cut off by the axe of a common woodsman, it was then embalmed and sent to the Pacha of Belgrade, and by him to the Sultan; and the news of his death was considered of such importance in Constantinople, as to be celebrated by a general illumination and public rejoicing of all the Osmanli.

With much reluctance we bade adieu to our hospitable entertainer, the kapitan, Nestor Arvamonowich, and the comforts we enjoyed at his konak, which though somewhat different from those of the inhabitants of Western Europe, might here be termed of a high order. We had the option given us either of passing the night in the winter chamber, under the verandah, or in a pretty kiosk in the garden, constructed in the form of an elevated umbrella, supported on wooden pillars, open to the winds of heaven, for these hardy mountaineers, disdaining the four walls of a house, sleep in the open air from St. George's Day to the middle of October. We had each a wellstuffed divan for a bed, downy pillows, and a quilted cotton counterpane for a covering. National pride forbidding that either a Frenchman or an Englishman should be considered less robust than a Servian, we selected the kiosk for our night's quarters; and as the climate was dry, and the weather beautiful, we found no reason to regret our choice.

VOL. I.

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