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twelve or fifteen years of age, goes from house to house singing a song, the burden of which is a wish for rain. It is then the custom of the mistress of the house at which the Dodola is stopped to throw a little water on her. This custom used also to be kept up in the Servian districts of Hungary, but has been forbidden by the priests.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Town life. The public offices.—Manners half-Oriental halfEuropean. Merchants and Tradesmen.-Turkish population.-Porters.-Barbers.-Cafés.-Public Writer.

ON passing from the country to the town the politician views with interest the transitional state of society: but the student of manners finds nothing salient, picturesque, or remarkable; every thing is verging to German routine. If you meet a young man in any department, and ask what he does; he tells you that he is a Concepist or Protocollist.

In the public offices, the paper is, as in Germany, atrociously coarse, being something like that with which parcels are wrapped up in England; and sand is used instead of blotting paper. They

PUBLIC OFFICES.

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commence business early in the morning, at eight o'clock, and go on till twelve, at which hour every body goes to the mid-day meal. They commence again at four o'clock, and terminate at seven, which is the hour of supper. The reason of this is, that almost every body takes a siesta.

The public offices throughout the interior of Servia are plain houses, with white-washed walls, deal desks, shelves, and presses, but having been recently built, have generally a respectable appearance. The Chancery of State and Senate house are also quite new constructions, close to the palace; but in the country, a Natchalnik transacts a great deal of business in his own house.

Servia contains within itself the forms of the East and the West, as separately and distinctly as possible. See a Natchalnik in the back woods squatted on his divan, with his enormous trowsers, smoking his pipe, and listening to the contents of a paper, which his secretary, crouching and kneeling on the carpet, reads to him, and you have the Bey, the Kaimacam, or the Mutsellim before you. See M. Petronievitch scribbling in

274

MERCHANTS AND TRADESMEN.

his cabinet, and you have the Fürstlicher HausHof-Staats- und Conferenz-Minister of the meridian of Saxe or Hesse.

Servia being an agricultural country, and not possessing a sea-port, there does not exist an influential, mercantile, or capitalist class per se. Greeks, Jews, and Tsinsars, form a considerable proportion of those engaged in the foreign trade : it is to be remarked that most of this class are secret adherents of the Obrenovitch party, while the wealthy native Servians support Kara Georgevitch.

In Belgrade, the best tradesmen are Germans, or Servians, who have learned their business at Pesth, or Temeswar; but nearly all the retailers are Servians.

Having treated so fully the aspects and machinery of Oriental life, in my work on native society in Damascus and Aleppo, it is not necessary that I should say here any thing of Moslem manners and customs. The Turks in Belgrade are nearly all of a very poor class, and follow the humblest occupations. The river navigation causes many hands to be employed in boating; and it always

TURKISH POPULATION.

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seemed to me that the proportion of the turbans on the river exceeded that of the Christian short fez. Most of the porters on the quay of Belgrade are Turks in their turbans, which gives the landing-place, on arrival from Semlin, a more Oriental look than the Moslem population of the town warrants. From the circumstance of trucks being nearly unknown in this country, these Turkish porters carry weights that would astonish an Englishman, and show great address in balancing and dividing heavy weights among them.

Most of the barbers in Belgrade are Turks, and have that superior dexterity which distinguishes their craft in the east. There are also Christian barbers; but the Moslems are in greater force. I never saw any Servian shave himself; nearly all resort to the barber. Even the Christian barbers, in imitation of the Oriental fashion, shave the straggling edges of the eye-brows, and with pincers tug out the small hairs of the

nostrils.

The native cafés are nearly all kept by Moslems; one, as I have stated elsewhere, by an Arab, born

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