Excerpt from Serbian Folk Songs, Fairy Tales and Proverbs
In spite of an ever-growing network of tight-fitting iron ribbons and copper threads, our old planet Earth still refuses to be squeezed and reduced to a nicely manageable globe, just so many times the size of the Albert Hall, with properly numbered and defined departments, with a common larder and with - an American Board of Directors. Distance and language are yet barriers proving as formidable to "progress" as racial antagonism, human inertia, greed, and ambition.
True, only about thirty-six hours are needed nowadays to travel from London to Serbia. No longer does the traveller settle all his worldly affairs before he crosses the frontier at Belgrade, as the author of Eothen did in 1835. But that the relatively shorter distance has not achieved everything Miss Mary E. Durham has shown us in her delightful book. Through the Lands of the Serb. It is but a little over ten years since she drew her charming word-pictures of impressions during her journey; but we read, "Guards and ticket-collectors agreed in telling me that it was impossible for me to go to Belgrade." When she travelled from Nis to Pirot an officious and stupid fellow-traveller actually succeeded in frightening her about her dangerous enterprise, "until I had a hail-C?sar-we-who-are-to-die-salute-thee feeling, which became less and less dignified as the West Balkans themselves came into sight. We reached Pirot, and I descended from the train in a state not unlike 'funk.' "
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