162 FIFTEEN DAYS ON THE DANUBE. 
where we could see through the branches another grand view 
of the distant heights of Servia. 
On the very crest of the hill we were met by the entire 
staff of keepers belonging to the three monasteries of this 
district. It consisted of two brigand-looking fellows whom 
it would certainly have been imprudent to have encountered 
alone on a dark night. These men are appointed by all the 
monasteries in common, and, as we were informed by the 
forester, do not receive any pay whatever; so the poor 
fellows have to live upon the game, which they kill all the 
year round, without the slightest respect for any game-laws 
or close-time, selling some of it and eating the rest. 
They were a couple of big robust men, with dark brown 
weather-beaten faces, long drooping moustaches, and jet- 
black ringleted hair, and would have served as fine character- 
istic models for the South Slavonian type of face. They 
wore a sort of spencer-like coat, with a thick leather waistcoat 
under it, and short wide trousers, while a big hunting-knife 
stuck in a belt, a wretched single-barrelled muzzle-loading 
rifle, a large ammunition-wallet, leggings, sandals, and finally 
a large hat and a twisted vine-stick formed the other accou- 
trements of these two very singular fellows. 
The most striking thing about their attire was that it 
consisted of nothing but bits of rags which they had picked 
up and then sewn together; it therefore had a spotted harlequin 
sort of look, the general tone of the whole being dirty yellow. 
One of the men had a kind of hound, which he led by a 
cord, a wolfish-looking beast—indeed so like a wolf that if one 
had met it in the dusk, one would undoubtedly have shot it 
as such. Both of them were very polite and even rather 
servile, for they at first wanted to kneel down, and they made 
all sorts of signs of the greatest devotion. Count Chotek’s 
forester detested them and treated them with the greatest 
brusqueness, for these cloister-keepers are the very worst 
