308 ENTER SERVIA. 



grievously disappointed. The Danube's banks 

 are a dead, flat, marshy, and unwholesome Delta 

 for many miles, an uninteresting country (except- 

 ing the snow-topped Balkan in the back-ground) 

 for many more, and only on reaching the Servian 

 frontier does the traveller, whose patience has 

 begun to be wellnigh exhausted, begin to con- 

 sider himself fortunate in having his eye relieved 

 from the dead, flat, and disagreeable monotony 

 to which during the whole preceding portion of 

 his voyage it has been so long accustomed. 



We needed no guide to point out to us when 

 we had passed the Servian frontier. The first 

 village shewed us most clearly that we had 

 entered a different territory, in which, from some 

 cause or other, the state of the population was 

 inconceivably superior to that of the Bulgarians. 

 Neat white houses, with red tiles, apparently the 

 perfection of cleanliness, a well-cultivated country, 

 and a general appearance of happiness and pros- 

 perity, were a strange contrast to the miserable, 

 though generally clean, mud and thatched huts of 

 the Bulgarians. Here there was cultivation in- 

 stead of desolation, and a well-dressed, happy- 

 looking population, in the place of squalid misery 



