everywhere, as fine and soldier-like young men as I had seen anywhere in
Europe. They and the common soldiers, with their fine shoulders and
chests and wiry torsos, looked as though they were made for their work,
and took to it like ducks to water.

The palace is on the central square--an unpretentious building in the
trees, with a driveway leading up from two gates, at which stand two
motionless sentries, each with one stiff feather in his cap. It is such
an entrance as you might expect to find at any comfortable country place
at home, and one day, when some student volunteers went by on a practise
march, and cheered as they passed, I saw the King, with the Queen and
one or two others, stroll down the drive and bow just as if he, too,
were some comfortable country gentleman.

There is a music-hall in Sofia, but on the two nights I went to it there
were scarce twenty in the audience. There are various beer gardens with
music, and, of course, moving pictures, but it was interesting, in
contrast with Bucarest to find the crowd going to the National Theatre
to see Tolstoi's "Living Corpse." The stock company, moderately
subsidized by the government, gives drama and opera on alternate nights.
I barely got a seat for the Tolstoi play, and the doorkeeper said that
the house was always sold out.

The Bulgarians, in short, are simple, and what the Rumanians would call
"serieux"--you must abandon all notion of finding here anything like the
little comic-opera kingdoms invented by some of our novelists. It was
in Bulgaria, as I recall it, that Mr. Shaw put "Arms and the Man," and
the fun lay, as you will remember, in the contrast between the outworn,
feudal notions of the natives and the intense matter-of-factness of the
modern Swiss professional soldier.