to me, at any rate, the most "American" of the Balkan peoples.

There is, of course, one concrete reason for this: Robert College and
the American School for Girls (Constantinople College) at
Constantinople. It was men educated at Robert College who became the
leaders of modern Bulgaria. The only Bulgarian I had known before--I
met him on the steamer--had gone from a little village near Sofia to
Harvard. His married sister had learned English at the American School
for Girls; her husband, a Macedonian Bulgar, had worked his way through
Yale. The amiable old general, who was always in the library at the
Sofia Club at tea time, ready to tell how the Dardanelles and
Constantinople could be taken, had learned English at Robert College and
had a son there; the photographer who developed my films also had a son
there--and so on.

Snow-capped mountains rise just behind Sofia, and the brown hills
thereabout, like the rolling plateaus along the shoulders of which the
train crawls on the way down from Rumania, are speckled with sheep.
Sometimes even in Sofia you will meet a shepherd patiently urging his
little flock up a modern concrete sidewalk and stopping now and then for
some passer-by to pick up a lamb, "heft" it, poke it, and feel its wool
before deciding whether or not he should take it home for dinner.

These shepherds wear roomy, short box-coats of sheepskin, with the
leather outside and the wool turned in, like a motor-coat; homespun
breeches embroidered, very likely in blue, and laced from the knee down,
and a sort of moccasin or laced soft shoe. They are as common in the
streets of Sofia as are the over-barbered young snipes in the streets of
Bucarest. On market days the main down-town street is filled with them--
long-limbed, slow-moving old fellows, with eyes and foreheads wrinkled