A STREET IN SOFIA.

gilt buttons, who answered as prefect of police, might be so considered.

I ran up against this gentleman before I quitted the palace grounds. He had already run up against me at the station on my arrival, as I afterward discovered, and had entered me as a suspicious character at sight. In five minutes he had bored me so full of questions that I became as transparent as my passport, which he held up to the light so that

he could read its water-mark. Next he went through my sketch-book page by page, and finally through all my letters until he came to one bearing at its top the image of the American eagle and at its bottom the superscription of one of its secretaries, answering for my sobriety, honesty, and industry; whereupon he waved me to the door with full permission to roam and sketch at my will. Then he put a special detective on my track, who never took his eyes from me during any one of my waking hours.

I did not ask this potentate whether the prince was coming back. I did not consider it an opportune moment.

Neither did I discuss with him the present condition of Bulgaria, there being nothing in the cut of his coat-nor of his eye, for that matter-to indicate his present political views. He might have been an adherent of the prince, or a believer in Panitza, or a minion of Stamboloff, or he might have been so evenly balanced on the edge of events as to be all three or

none.

Nor did I explain to him how grieved I was that his present lords and masters should have seen fit to absent themselves just at the precise moment when their combined presence would have been so agreeable to me. I had really crossed desert wastes to study their complicated comedy, and now all the principal actors were out of town.

A REHEARSAL of the preceding acts of this play may be of use to the better understanding of the whole drama as it was then being developed in Bulgaria. It is not heroic; it cannot even be called romantic, this spectacle in which three millions of souls are seen hunting about Europe for a sovereign-a sort of still-hunt resulting in the capture of two kings in four years, with hopes of bagging a protector or a president before the fifth is out. But to the play itself.

At present in Bulgaria there are, first, the Russophiles, who, as Petko Karaveloff says, "pray for the time when Bulgaria shall march into Salonica, while Russia marches into Constantinople," and who believe the Czar to be their natural friend and ally, with the only hope of settled peace in his protectorate. Secondly, the loyal oppositionists, headed by M. Radoslavoff, who would support the prince with certain concessions, but who detest his advisers. And thirdly, the sympathizers of Major Panitza, the murdered patriot, who was "shot"so ran a proclamation a week old, patches of which were still pointed out to me decorating the walls of the king's palace-"by the order of the bloodthirsty Ferdinand, the scoundrel Stamboloff, and the 'Vaurien' Moutkourov."

The most active and aggressive of all these "traitors," as Stamboloff calls them, are the friends of Major Panitza. Their sympathy is not to be wondered at, for the circumstances surrounding Panitza's arrest and execution had not only been horrifying to his friends, but to many of his enemies as well; and all had been shocked at the brutal haste with which the death penalty had been inflicted.

This young officer, a devoted adherent of Prince Alexander, had served with distinction in the Servian war, having led one of the famous charges at Slivnitza. After the abdication of Alexander and the accession of Prince Ferdinand, he had taken the oath of fealty to the new régime, although he had never been a warm admirer of the prince. Becoming rest

less under what he considered the despotism of Stamboloff,- a man whom he knew thoroughly, being his own relative,- and believing that the only salvation for his country lay in Russian interference, he had joined hands with a Russian spy, Kolobkoff, in fomenting discord in the army. Unluckily, his own letters, carrying unmistakable evidence of the plot, fell into the hands of Stamboloff himself, resulting in his immediate arrest, trial, and condemnation by court martial. In consideration, however, of his former distinguished services to the state, the court urgently recommended the commutation of his sentence to banishment or imprisonment.

It is greatly to the credit of Prince Ferdinand that he was strongly inclined to grant the appeal and to spare Panitza. He, in fact, held

out for more than a week against the combined assaults of Stamboloff and his brotherin-law, Moutkourov,-then Minister of War,and it was not until his prime minister threatened the resignation of the entire cabinet that he finally yielded. There is even a story current that when this threat failed Stamboloff followed the king to Lom Palanka with the death-warrant in his hand, and that when he still hesitated that implacable dictator remarked sententiously:

we can

"Sire, Major Panitza dies on the morrow. If you continue to object, there is one thing we can always do for your Majesty always buy you a first-class ticket to Vienna." The next morning at ten o'clock a close carriage containing a priest, a gendarme, and the condemned man was driven from the house of detention to the summer encampment, two miles outside of Sofia. The whole garrison was drawn up. Panitza walked with a firm step to a designated tree,1 saluting the officers as he passed. When a sergeant stepped forward to blindfold him, he caught the handkerchief from his hand. Then, with a cry that rang through the camp of "Long live Bulgaria!" he fell, pierced with twenty-one bullets.

So perished a gallant young soldier whose only crime, viewed in the light of the unrecognized government then assuming to rule Bulgaria, seems to have been his disagreement with the present political views of M. Stamboloff.

In view of these and preceding events it must not, however, be thought that the fortunes of Ferdinand and his prime minister are identical. If the prince is playing king in Bulgaria because he loves the sense of power,- and it is exceedingly difficult to believe that he can. have any other motive,—it is still true that Stamboloff is manager and holds the box-office, and that he is likely to change the "star" whenever it pleases his fancy; provided, of course, the Bulgarian audiences still come to the play. In other words, provided the various factions struggling to get control do not break up the theater and throw the company and the properties into the street.

It is also equally true that M. Stefan Stamboloff is to-day by far the most commanding personality in his country. Never a soldier, and always a politician, with only three years' schooling at Odessa, he became when hardly grown a Russian correspondent, and for some years thereafter a Russian agent. Rising rapidly by his own force of character, he was appointed a regent by Alexander when he abdicated, and now when only thirty-six years of age occupies more of the nervous attention

1 This tree has since been carried off piecemeal, cut to its very roots by admirers of Panitza.

of the governments of eastern Europe than any other one man west of the Bosphorus. Stamboloff's plan for governing was simple and to the point. It called for five millions of rubles and a king. Who this king might be, or where he should hail from, was a matter of detail. Anybody but a Russian or a Turk would do. And so numerous offers were made in a confidential way to various gentlemen who thought they had an especial, divine gift for reigning, and who lacked the opportunity only because of the depleted condition of their bank accounts. At last a fond and ambitious mother and an obliging son with an almost unlimited reserve fund-unlimited for the ordinary needs of life took the bait.

It was not, however, a harmonious family arrangement; for it was well known that the young prince's uncle, the Duke of SaxeCoburg, did what he could to prevent the final agreement; he being an older and wiser

diplomat, and having had a long and varied experience in the ups and downs of several see-saw governments. Among other things, the duke boldly stated that it was only a question of money with the Bulgarian regents, and that Ferdinand would leave the throne when his guldens were gone, as Alexander had left, to whom the Bulgarian Government then owed three millions of francs. The duke's prophecy is not yet fulfilled. If, however, the statement of reliable Bulgarians is to be taken, a very considerable portion of Ferdinand's private estate (variously estimated at from one-half to all of it) has already been absorbed.

There were, of course, cogent reasons for these drafts on the king's exchequer, so the cabinet said. The army was to be re-armed and clothed, an important railroad built, and a thousand and one improvements made. The

VOL. XLII.-10.

money, of course, would be returned. This schedule has been literally carried out,-except the money item,-if not to the benefit of Bulgaria herself, certainly to the depletion of the prince's bank-account.

Among these schemes the beautifying of the capital was the most seductive. Streets were to be opened, and trees planted, and flowers made to bloom. I recall now that vast band of stagnant dust leading from the station to the town, separated from its surrounding monotony by sundry depressions and grades indicated along the line by the excavated debris. which fringed its edges; with a double row of infant trees marking its curb-lines, each one of which was shriveled to a crisp by the blistering heat. Added to this mockery, at regular intervals stood flower-beds in ovals, and diamonds, and circles, filled with plants burned to

months. Indeed, many prominent oppositionists did not hesitate to say, and to say openly, that the haste with which these so-called improvements were carried out was due as much to the unsettled condition of public affairs as to anything else, and that the old adage of making hay while the sun shone had a double meaning in this case.

The boulevard, however, is not the only part of Sofia illustrating the prevailing taste to overturn and reconstruct. One sees it in the new part of the town, where government buildings, bare, white, and forbidding, are going up in all directions, replacing the humbler dwellings of the poor. One sees it also in the old mosque-and-garden-landmarks left standing high above new streets now being cut to their very edges; their preservation a tacit acknowledgment of their right to exist, their isolation a forerunner of their death-quite as the old traditions are being undermined by the present Government.

Many of these streets serve a double purpose. They make a short route to the palace of the king, where some of them end, and they provide right of way for hasty artillery. practice. One cannot always tell in so changeable a climate as Bulgaria when the prevailing. political wind may shift.

The palace itself, a great hospital-looking building surrounded by a garden, its mansard roofs rising above the trees, is barren and uninteresting, and contains only a few of the luxurious appointments one expects to find in an abode reserved for kings in high places. Indeed, the whole air of the interior suggests only stately discomfort and emptiness. In walking through its great halls and scantily furnished salons, I could not help pondering upon the peculiarities of human nature, and wondering what could have induced this fine. young officer - and he is a fine fellow in every sense of the word to give up his brilliant life in Vienna, the most delightful capital in Europe, and to a young man of fortune the most fascinating, in order to bury himself in this ugly pile of masonry. But then the market is never overstocked with empty thrones, while would-be kings are a drug.

The old part of the town is still quaint and Oriental, and has thus far escaped the restless shovel and saw. It lies in the dip of a saucershaped valley, surrounded by bare brown hills, the palace and the new buildings being on the upper edge. Netted with crooked, dirty streets and choked with low, shambling houses, with here and there a ruined mosque, it remains a picturesque reminder of the days of Turkish rule, unchanged since the signing of the Berlin Treaty, when in a single year five thousand of Mohammed's chosen shook the