Ministers and officers in command

Anybody, as a rule, can go in and out of the Bulgarian stations, which are not kept closed after the usual continental fashion; but on the present occasion nobody, not known to the officials, was allowed to enter the station. It was a raw, bleak morning, though the sun was shining brightly, and all the Ministers and officers in command of the escort had crowded into the station restaurant The whole company, including two high ecclesiastical dignitaries of the Bulgarian Church, with long, black, flowing robes, and high cardboard hats, looking like a section of a stove pipe with a flat rim round the top, were smoking cigarettes and drinking brandy while awaiting the Prince’s arrival.

The Ministers were in evening dress, wrapped up in furs and Inverness capes, and had the aspect of men who had not been to bed all night, and who had not had time to change their clothes before they left home. Very few men look well in broad daylight when clad in seamy, rumpled dress-suits and soiled white ties, and the Bulgarian Ministers are certainly no exception to the common rule. They are not built in the dress-clothes way, and whenever I saw them in other than their work-a- day costumes, they always reminded me of the supers who appear as the courtiers in Hamlet, when played at the provincial theatre.

Whole Cabinet Council

Moreover, the spectacle of a whole Cabinet Council sitting round the beer-stained table of a railway refreshment room, and standing drinks to each other of beer and brandy, is not, somehow, in accordance with Western ideas of official dignity. If occasion calls, these peasant politicians can act the part of statesmen with no lack of manner; but when they are not so to speak on duty, the old peasant nature comes at once to the surface. It is the same to a great extent with the soldiers. A stronger, sturdier body of men, privates as well as officers, I have never seen; but though they are not slovenly, one cannot honestly say that they are smart.