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Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has
deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Brief Contents
Preface xix
Chapter 1 Introduction to Financial Reporting 1
Chapter 2 Introduction to Financial Statements and Other
Financial Reporting Topics 54
Chapter 3 Balance Sheet 95
Chapter 4 Income Statement 157
Chapter 5 Basics of Analysis 199
Chapter 6 Liquidity of Short-Term Assets; Related Debt-Paying Ability 223
Chapter 7 Long-Term Debt-Paying Ability 278
Chapter 8 Profitability 323
Chapter 9 For the Investor 365
Chapter 10 Statement of Cash Flows 393
Summary Analysis Nike, Inc. (Includes 2011
Financial Statements of Form 10-K) 438
Chapter 11 Expanded Analysis 482
Chapter 12 Special Industries: Banks, Utilities, Oil and Gas,
Transportation, Insurance, and Real Estate Companies 540
Chapter 13 Personal Financial Statements and Accounting for
Governments and Not-for-Profit Organizations 588
Appendix Thomson ONE Basics and Tutorial 615
Glossary 621
Bibliography 641
Index 653
vii
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deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Contents
Preface xix
Chapter 1 Introduction to Financial Reporting 1
DEVELOPMENT OF GENERALLY ACCEPTED ACCOUNTING PRINCIPLES
(GAAP) IN THE UNITED STATES 1
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants • Financial Accounting
Standards Board • Operating Procedure for Statements of Financial
Accounting Standards • FASB Conceptual Framework
ADDITIONAL INPUT—AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CERTIFIED PUBLIC
ACCOUNTANTS (AICPA) 7
EMERGING ISSUES TASK FORCE (EITF) 8
A NEW REALITY 8
FASB ACCOUNTING STANDARDS CODIFICATION™
(CODIFICATION) 10
TRADITIONAL ASSUMPTIONS OF THE ACCOUNTING MODEL 10
Business Entity • Going Concern or Continuity • Time Period •
Monetary Unit • Historical Cost • Conservatism • Realization • Matching •
Consistency • Full Disclosure • Materiality • Industry Practices • Transaction
Approach • Cash Basis • Accrual Basis
HARMONIZATION OF INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTING
STANDARDS 19
FINANCIAL REPORTING STANDARDS FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED
ENTITIES (SMES) 22
USING THE INTERNET 23
Companies’ Internet Web Sites • Helpful Web Sites
SUMMARY 24 / QUESTIONS 24 / PROBLEMS 26 / CASES 32
Case 1-1 Standard Setting: “A Political Aspect” 32
Case 1-2 Politicization of Accounting Standards—A Necessary Act? 35
Case 1-3 Independence of Accounting Standard Setters 36
Case 1-4 Looking Out for Investors 39
ix
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x CONTENTS
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CONTENTS xi
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CONTENTS xiii
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deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
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CONTENTS xv
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xvi CONTENTS
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deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
CONTENTS xvii
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deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
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deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Preface
T
his book teaches financial accounting from both the user’s and the preparer’s perspec-
tives. It includes the language and the preparation of financial statements. Reliance is
placed on actual annual reports, 10-Ks, and proxy statements. Sufficient background
material is included, facilitating its use for students who do not have prior courses in
accounting or finance.
Tell me, I’ll forget.
Show me, I may remember.
Involve me, I’ll understand.
This proverb describes the approach of this book—involving students in actual financial
statements and their analysis and interpretation. Its premise is that students are better pre-
pared to understand and analyze real financial reports when learning is not based on over-
simplified financial statements.
From this basic premise come the many changes to this edition. Those changes, sup-
ported by our technology tools, focus on the goal of this text, which is to involve students in
actively learning how to read, understand, and analyze the financial statements of actual
companies. These changes are discussed in this preface.
Significant Items
The following notable items are available in this edition to increase its relevance to students
and its flexibility for instructors:
1. Coverage of ethics has been expanded.
2. International accounting has been updated to reflect the substantial changes that have
taken place. This includes model financial statements.
3. Internet exercises have been updated and new exercises added.
4. Questions have been updated and new questions added.
5. Problems have been updated and new problems added.
6. Where appropriate, cases have been updated and new cases added. This includes more
than 70 revised and new cases.
7. Exhibits and cases are extensively based on real companies to which students would
relate.
xix
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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
On these hearths reposed cylindrical pots with curious lids, and
above the fire great iron caldrons, capable of providing for many
mouths, were hung from the wooden arms of primitive jacks, such
as I remember having seen in Finnish cottages.
The common hall contained little but a long table and two long
benches, recalling, except for its honeycombed stove, the furniture
of an Oxford College hall. It is here that the whole family take their
meals; and in the winter time, when the stoveless summer dwellings
are uninhabitable, it is here that the men take shelter from the blast
to make or mend their rude implements of husbandry, and the
women ply their homely looms. They told us further that this was
the room in which the family met to choose their house-father or
house-mother, and to transact all common business; and, since
dinner is the natural time for all the family to be assembled together,
it is after dinner that these matters of household economy are
mooted, and the house-father, who represents the family in dealings
with the authorities, and the house-mother, who shares with her
consort[161] his patriarchal sway over the rest of the house-
community, are elected. It is here, too, that the domestic
government is thrown out if it does not continue to give satisfaction
to its constituents. In short, this is their little Parliament-House, and
these the earliest germs of Constitutional Government.
But we must leave Slavonia for the present, and transport
ourselves back in some aërial fashion to Karlovac, from which town
we are about to make our way to Siszek by the last strip of railway
we were to see for many a long day. It may be that it was lucky that
such a means of transit was still at our disposal, since, if we had
been obliged to foot it, we must have run the gauntlet of a band of
robbers then infesting the country near Petrinia. As a rule our
Croatian friends were never tired of assuring us that it was beyond
the frontier that these gentry flourished; and the hilly country that
rose to the south-west—the Kraina, as the promontory of Turkish
territory is known, which acts as a thorn in the side of Austria—was
pointed out as a regular asylum for wild characters, and in fact was
long the only part of the frontier where the watch-service was still
needed. At the present moment, however, even the Croats were fain
to admit that Bosnia was free from robbers, while their own country
was insecure; and, indeed, I am afraid that this was not such an
exceptional state of things as they would have had us believe, for
when we arrived two days later in the Slavonian lands of the lower
Save we found the whole country under martial law, owing to the
murderous infestations of brigands in the Syrmian highlands; and
though several had been hanged, the reign of terror was such that
the military government was still continued. Indeed, just after the
Austro-Prussian war, the state of Croatia had become so deplorable
by reason of the increasing brigandage, that ‘Standrecht’ had to be
proclaimed there, and no less than forty robbers were hung. For
some time a gibbet with its ghastly appendages was to be seen from
the train on nearing Agram.
On the whole, then, it was more comfortable to indulge in such
reflections as we shot through the mighty oak-forest in a railway-
carriage bound for Siszek, than to sneak through these mysterious
shadows on foot with the feelings of one of our great-grandfathers,
when doomed to traverse Hampstead Heath on a dark night. These
Croatian highwaymen, however, immediately under notice, had
hitherto conducted the business of the road on the most
gentlemanly principles; and though a kind of ‘commercial’ with
whom we travelled seemed a bit scared, even he could report no
thrilling tales of bloodshed. There were sixteen of these Hajduks,
[162] as the Croats called them, who had taken to outlawry to avoid
the military conscription, which has just superseded the older
organisation of the Granitza. Soldiers have been in pursuit, but
fruitlessly, since not only are the hills about covered with
unfathomable forest and hollowed—so we were told—with caverns,
but the peasants, like those of Greece and Southern Italy, are in
league with the brigands, supplying them with food, and refusing to
reveal their hiding-places. The gendarmes, indeed, express hopes of
seizing their quarry when the leaves have fallen and the snow is on
the ground. Meantime they are at large. Nor let us judge too harshly
of their profession, for in this old world East of Europe the Hajduk is
often a gentleman in his way. ’Tis Robin Hood and his merry men
who still live on, roughly redressing their wrongs in a vicarious
fashion against that society which refuses them legal requital, but
capable none the less of much tenderness to women and children,
and discriminating their friends from the class that oppresses them.
Across the Turkish frontier the cause of national freedom, hopelessly
lost centuries ago on the battlefield, has been championed from
generation to generation by the Hajduks of the forest mountain, in
achievements not unsung by Sclavonic bards; and, likely enough,
these Croatian brothers are striving too for ancient liberties, as they
understand them.
It was late at night by the time we arrived at Siszek, so we were
glad enough to avail ourselves of a car bound for the ‘White Ship’
inn on the Kulpa Quay, in company with a Serbian lady and her child
—she disdaining not either for herself or boy the national costume of
Free Serbia. And verily she had her reward. For what could be more
appropriate than the rich silver embroidery flowered on the purple-
velvet field of her mantle—efflorescent with the poetic yearning of
the race for that gorgeous Orient, a yearning as lively as the
abhorrence from its yoke—an echo from the Serbian lyre—a protest
against your cold foggy West—but subdued withal by a Roman-
matronly coiffure wondrously becoming to the tranquil grace of
Serbian motherhood?
Arrived at our inn, we found ourselves plunged at once into
Turkish society, for many Bosnian corn-merchants from Bihac,
Serajevo, and other towns, betake themselves in the way of trade to
Siszek. Among the group of Turks who, in various awkward and frog-
like postures, were endeavouring to accommodate themselves to
chairs, was an Effendi, a title which implies not only a certain grade
of Turkish gentility, but an education for Bosnia most polite, namely,
the ability to read and write; and, what is by no means ordinary
among the Mussulman Sclaves of Bosnia, an acquaintance with
Osmanlì. Thus it was with a conscious sense of superiority that our
Effendi, learning our intentions in Bosnia, expressed a desire to see
the pass which the Vali Pashà had been good enough to supply us
with. He seemed extremely surprised to see that it was in the Vali’s
own handwriting; but having convinced himself of the fact, he first
read it aloud with pleasing gusto in the original Turkish, and then
translated it into Bosniac for the benefit of the Sclavonic
Mahometans and our Croatian landlord, with many assurances that
with such an ‘open sesamé’ we should have no difficulty in unlocking
the innermost fastnesses of Bosnia or even the Herzegovina, where
the revolt had now broken out.
There was also a venerable Turk of singularly dignified mien, with
patriarchal beard and capacious turban, who sat in mild
contemplation, lulled by the measured purring of his narghilé, lost to
all mundane concerns, sagely superior to the curiosity which our
pass and travelling gear were exciting in less exalted bosoms, and
benignantly indifferent even to the indignity of a chair. Our host told
us that he was a Hadji, or pilgrim, then on his way from Buda,
where he resided as a merchant, to Mecca.
Aug. 8.—Next morning we sallied forth to explore what might
remain of ancient Siscia. For we are now on classic ground. Siszek is
but the corruption of a name great in all ages of imperial Rome, and
greatest in the twilight of her empire. There was a time when Siscia
was one of the sovereign cities of the world. She was a bulwark
against barbarians, an emporium of commerce, a seat of emperors,
a mother of martyrs, a gathering point for Roman-Christian Saga.
And her older name, Segestica, takes us back to times prior to the
Roman conquest itself, when she formed part of that Celtic empire of
race, dim, commercial, reaching from Gades to the swamps of
Nether Rhine; from glacial Ierné to the mouths of Ister. Segestica!
we have no record of her dealings with the Adriatic votaries of
Belenus,[163] nor what Taurisk gold passed current in her streets;
and yet her peasant citizens of to-day plough up an abundance of
bronze-age sickles as if to bear witness of her old Celtic industry and
her very name calls up golden harvests of antiquity ready garnered
into her warehouses from rich Pannonian plains, with a side
suggestion perchance of her
Dejectum placidissimo
Amnis vertice suscipit;
Nec mergi patitur sibi,
Miris vasta natatibus
Saxi pondera sustinens,
till, having exhorted the faithful and confounded the heathen from
his watery pulpit, his spirit ascends and the laws of gravity resume
their sway.
In the dark period which followed the barbarian invasions,
something of her old secular glory was still reflected in the Siscian
Church. After the destruction of Sirmium by the Huns in 441, Siscia
transferred her ecclesiastical allegiance to Salona. Her decline was
more lingering than that of her rival, for her prosperity had rested on
a more solid foundation. Her bishops survive the settlement of the
Sclaves hereabouts in the time of Heraclius. In the ninth century we
find her the residence of a Sclavonic prince; but she suffered from
the Frankish invasion, and in the tenth century was finally razed by
the Magyars. Now at last the Siscian episcopate dies out, to live
again with renewed splendour at Agram.
The old walls of Siscia are traced in a pear-shaped form on the left
bank of the Kulpa between it and the Save. But just outside our inn,
on the right bank of the river, we came upon several fragments of
old Siscia, some sculptures and inscriptions walled into the
foundations of modern houses. In the tympanum of a door are three
sculptures, one of which may be meant for Apollo, though only the
head and half the body survive, and another for Andromeda; these
two of base art; but the third, a griffin, of somewhat better work.
Here and there were stumps of columns, and Roman tiles might be
seen still in use. On the hill above, still on the right side of the Kulpa,
the wooden cottages almost always rested on foundations composed
of Roman blocks, amongst which many inscriptions may lie hid,
though we discovered none that had not already been
conscientiously described by Agram antiquaries. It was strange,
however, to observe how the irony of fate had converted to modern
utility the pomp of ancient funerals and the furniture of the ‘immortal
gods’! A Roman altar, with its face and what inscription there may
have been (for we could not get it raised), buried in the dust, had
been turned into a seat for Croat wives; a Roman sarcophagus in
one of the cottage yards had been converted into a horse-trough,
and another had been emended so as to form a serviceable sofa.
On the summit of the heights which here overlook the river is the
site of a Roman cemetery, and the owner of the vineyards where
most of the remains had been discovered kindly showed us over his
domain. Many fine sarcophagi—the best of which are to be seen in
the Agram museum—had been dug up here, containing the usual
amount of coins, lamps, urns, and ashes, amongst which the skull-
bones were most distinguishable. In one place we were shown a
Roman conduit, square in shape, and the outside glazed as if by a
conflagration. Near the old cemetery might be seen Roman walls,
and some cottage foundations consisting entirely of Roman tiles.
The most interesting Roman fragments were, however, on the left
side of the Kulpa, where the town walls are traceable, in a garden by
the railway-station. There we found an altar with an inscription[168]
showing that it was dedicated to Ceres, with a vase and patera
engraved on one side, and on the other a jar full of spikes of corn.
Close by lay mutilations of what once had been Corinthian capitals,
with rich acanthus-leaves decayed by many winters; fragments of a
marble frieze with wavy vine-sprays loaded with bunches of grapes
fit for the Land of Promise; besides, other marble bits on which were
sculptured beakers and telescopic flowers unknown to botanists, and
spiral knot-work which seemed almost Byzantine. It was pleasant to
believe that they all formed part of a temple of the corn-goddess,
though I doubt whether all the fragments could be attributed either
to the same building or the same age; and perhaps Father Liber or
Isis, whose altars have also been discovered here, may lay as good
claim to some of these vinous and floral devices as Mother Ceres.
But whatever view be taken, these remains are interesting as an
illustration of the old position of Siscia as centre of a corn and vine-
growing district; nor indeed are they inappropriate even to her
present state. The present town of Siszek derives what trade she
possesses mainly from the transport of cereals. Hither the maize and
wheat from the rich alluvial plains of the Banat and the Possávina, as
well as from the interior of Bosnia, are conveyed by the Save and its
tributaries; for Siszek is the point where the land-carriage to the
north and west commences, and she really stands to Trieste and
Fiume, with respect to the traffic between the Danubian basin and
the Adriatic, in much the same relation as her Roman ancestress
stood to Aquileja. Siszek has two really busy seasons in the year—in
the spring when the maize crop is gathered, and again the corn
harvest in August and September; and at these times her
population, normally reckoned at 3,800, rises to twice, or even, it is
said, to three times that number. The town, however, like many
other sites of Roman cities, is not so healthy as it was in former
times, and a curious plague of emerods is epidemic here. This
decrease of salubrity is attributed by the Siszekers themselves to the
great destruction of forests that has taken place in the
neighbourhood; with what reasons, let doctors decide.
However, modern science and drainage may probably be trusted
to remedy the present unhealthy state of the Siscian atmosphere;
and it requires no extraordinary gift of prophecy to be able to
foresee for Siszek a glorious future, and to predict that, before many
years are passed, she will have done much to regain the splendour
of Roman Siscia, whose functions, as we have seen, she still to a
certain extent performs. For she has been dowered with a situation
destined by nature for a great emporium of commerce, nor are signs
wanting that the fulfilment of her destiny is at hand. Already Siszek
is fixed as the point at which the railway that is to connect Western
Europe directly with Stamboul, and eventually perhaps the furthest
Orient, is to meet the lines leading to Vienna and Trieste, and
another line is projected, connecting Siszek directly with the Adriatic.
Siszek used to be divided by the Kulpa into the civil and military
towns, the latter under ‘regimental’ government; but since the new
legislation the whole has been placed under the municipal
authorities. In neither half is there anything worth seeing except the
Roman remains.
On the bank of the Kulpa, however, just at the confluence with the
Save, about a mile from Siszek, rises the old castle of Caprag, built
in a triangular form, with a round conical-roofed tower at each
corner. This castle brings home to us the old days when the Empire
was engaged in a life and death struggle with the Turk. It was built
in the sixteenth century, with the Emperor Ferdinand’s permission,
by the bishop and canons of Agram, and in 1592-3 it was gallantly
defended against the Pashà of Bosnia by two canons of the
cathedral chapter; till, after withstanding two sieges successfully, it
yielded to a third attempt, and for a year belonged to the Infidel.
[169]
But for better or worse our Rubicon is passed, and we land on the
Turkish shore, among a group of turbaned gentry, from amongst
whom emerges a somewhat tattered soldier, who conducts us to the
square, verandahed, Karaula or guard-house. Here we are asked by
another official, in Italian, if we have anything to declare in our
knapsacks, and having satisfied him by a simple ‘Niente,’ we are
again beckoned on by our soldier, and follow him into the narrow
street of Turkish Brood to show our pass to the Præfect or Mudìr.
Our appearance created as great a sensation as was decorous
among the big-turbans of the townlet; crowds of Bosnian gamins
followed at our heels; and we caught a passing glimpse of a dusky
Ethiopian maiden white-toothing us in the most coquettish fashion
from behind a door. As the Mudìr was not at home, we had to wait in
the front room of his Konak,[171] if indeed a place which possesses
neither door nor window, and is completely open to the air on the
street side, can be called a room; and taking our seat on the
platform or raised floor—which in the other houses of the town, as
generally in Turkey, is used as the squatting-place of the
shopkeepers, and the counter on which to display their wares—
became the gazing-stock of a motley assemblage, who, crowding
round in the street, or taking reserved seats in the melon-shop
opposite, ‘twigged us’ at their leisure.
We, too, obtained a breathing space in which to realise in what a
new world we were. The Bosniacs themselves speak of the other
side of the Save as ‘Europe,’ and they are right; for to all intents and
purposes a five minutes’ voyage transports you into Asia. Travellers
who have seen the Turkish provinces of Syria, Armenia, or Egypt,
when they enter Bosnia, are at once surprised at finding the familiar
sights of Asia and Africa reproduced in a province of European
Turkey. Thrace, Macedonia, the shores of the Ægean, Stamboul
itself, have lost or never displayed many Oriental customs and
costumes; but Bosnia remains the chosen land of Mahometan
Conservatism, the Goshen of the faithful, ennobled by the tombs of
martyrs, and known in Turkish annals as the ‘Lion that guards the
gates of Stamboul.’ Fanaticism has struck its deepest roots among
her renegade population, and reflects itself even in their dress. In no
other European province of Turkey is the veiling of women so strictly
attended to. It is said that not long ago the fine egg-shaped turbans
of the Janissaries might still be found in Bosnia, and the Maulouka,
the most precious of all mantles, which had died out elsewhere, long
survived among these Bosnian Tories. As to the introduction of
fezzes, the Imperial order almost provoked a revolt here; and to this
day among Mahometans the fez is almost confined to officials, the
rest of the believers going about in the capacious turbans of the
East.
The very darkness of the background, the dirty narrow street, the
timber houses, the time-stained wooden minaret, acted as a foil to
the Oriental brilliance of the dress and merchandise, the scarlet
sashes, the gold embroidery, those gorgeous little maidens—doomed
most of them by sweet thirteen to take the winding-sheets of
Turkish matrimony, and bury their beauty in harems, where by
thirty-five they are turned old hags; but now, poor little butterflies!
fluttering out their brief child-glimpse of the world—light-smocked, in
linen chemises, chevroned with rainbow threads of colour—bagged
as to their legs, but beflowered with roses of Shiraz—pranked out
with gilt coin-bespangled fezzes, whence fountain-like the separate
jets of their tresses trickle forth in a score of silken plaits; Perilets,
with sisterly arms round each other’s necks, deigning to smile on the
strange Giaours. There, too, are their little brothers, showing more
of their slender legs, but gay as their sisters, in bags and tunics, with
pates not yet artificially baldened, but long-haired as the little
maidens, only in softer cascades, falling down their backs, and
fringing their foreheads. Capillati (Copi is still the word for boys
among the Roumans of East Europe)—one almost hoped to see a
bulla round their necks! and indeed I doubt not that they wore many
a potent spell against the Evil Eye.
There was one little lad of about five, with blue eyes and hair of
Scandinavian lightness, the cut of which called up some tiny page of
Charles the Second’s days, who, with some of his playmates,
crowded so near as to shut out the view of the two mysterious
Franks from the grave and reverend signiors behind, whereupon a
Turk, who happened to hold a small switch in his hand, came
forward and flicked these small flies away. The whip just touched our
small urchin, who moved out of the way with the others. He did not
cry, but more, as it seemed, in sorrow than in anger, fixed on his
flagellator a look of such childish dignity and grave surprise as
should have annihilated anyone less impassive than a Turk. It said,
as plainly as a look can speak, ‘I am not accustomed to such
treatment.’ The look of a child may seem a slight matter, but it was
eloquent of the tenderness with which the Turks treat children—a
tenderness which does them honour. Such an unkind cut was a new
experience in the little lad’s life.
When our observers had taken sufficient stock of us, the propriety
of showing us into an upper room of the Konak suggested itself to
some of them, and we were accordingly led upstairs, and invited to
squat in a den belonging to some subordinate official, who, while
waiting the Mudìr’s arrival, treated us to coffee. It was a very dirty
little room, in which the rags and tatters of an old piece of faded
carpet and rotten matting made shift for chairs and sofas; these,
with a stove such as has been described already, pigeon-holed with
pots, and a broken water-jar, completing the inventory of the
furniture. After a tedious delay, during which we supposed the
worthy præfect to be at his mid-day prayers, or more probably his
siesta, the Mudìr arrived, and we were ushered into his room of
state, distinguished from that of his sub. by containing a larger area
of dirt, and by displaying a larger piece of carpet with a more
capacious patch, but also by possessing a greasy divan on which we
were beckoned by the Mudìr to take our seat by his side. Our official
had turned out in grey clothes of European cut, and a regulation fez;
but as he could only speak Turkish, Arabic, and Bosniac, and as we
could none of these, an interpreter had to be found in the shape of
an Italian-speaking Dalmatian woman before we could hold much
communication. The Mudìr was well satisfied with our Bujuruldu; but
when we expressed our determination to walk through the country,
he was fairly taken aback. It was evidently a case which had never
before come within his official experience. There was no precedent
for such conduct. Nobody, he assured us, ever thought of travelling
on foot in Bosnia; if we wanted a horse or a waggon, he was ready
to oblige—but to walk! We had to explain that walking was a
weakness of English people; and at last, as I think the good man
began to believe that it was connected with our religion, and that we
were pilgrims of some sort, he gave over trying to convert us to the
Bosnian way of thinking, and told off a Zaptieh to escort us to our
that day’s destination, Dervent. Our attempts to rid ourselves from
having this encumbrance failed, as the autograph letter of the Pashà
made him responsible for our safety.
We left Turkish Brood, after first mollifying our Zaptieh with a
present of tobacco, and for a few miles followed the road along the
Save valley, stopping once to purchase at a roadside cottage some
sweet milk—slátko miléko. I have come upon some of our Sclavonic
cousins who could understand the English word! The homesteads
were very like the Croatian and Slavonian in general arrangement.
The common yard and paling, the wooden cottage roofed with long
shingles, and the various outhouses, were there, but the wickerwork
maize-garners were less capacious and more like large clothes-
baskets, and the whole was on a smaller scale. We heard that the
system of house-communities existed hereabouts to a much less
extent than on the Austrian side of the Save, but here and there as
many as three or four families are to be found in the same
homestead with a common house-father and house-mother. Round
each cottage were a number of plum-trees, and in each yard was a
small distillery for making Slivovitz. Further on, a Serbian merchant
drove up in an Arabà or native waggon, and courteously invited us
to take a quarter of an hour’s lift, which we accepted, though it was
sad jolty work, and we were not sorry to get out again.
Soon after passing a Turkish graveyard, with the usual turbaned
tombstones—some of the turbans of majestic height—we turned off
from the Save valley, and, leaving the road, waded across the Ukrina
stream, when to our astonishment the Zaptieh, instead of following,
stood shivering on the brink; but our surprise was turned to
indignation when the fellow shouted to a Christian woman, who was
passing along the other bank, to carry him across! We gave vent to
such forcible expressions of disapprobation as deterred the poor
woman from obeying my lord’s commands; but a rayah man coming
up, the Zaptieh, notwithstanding our indignant Jok! jok! (No! no!)
succeeded in requisitioning him, and in spite of all our gesticulations
the Christian carried over our escort on his back. When the Zaptieh
saw that we were very angry, he recompensed his bearer with a
handful of tobacco; and it must be owned that the Christian seemed
satisfied with the transaction, and that neither the leggings nor the
boots of the Zaptieh were adapted for rapid disembarrassment.
Further on we ascended a gentle chain of hills by delicious foot-
paths across hayfields, or amidst luxuriant crops of maize—through
oak-forests, and, what was stranger, woods of plum-trees laden with
small unripe fruit; and now and again along pretty country lanes,
where the hedges feasted us with a profusion of blackberries whose
size attested the richness of the soil, and whose flavour seemed to
combine all that was nicest in blackberry and mulberry. Both fields
and hedgerows were varied with a beautiful array of flowers,
amongst which I noticed yellow snapdragon, sky-blue flax, a sweet
flowering-rush, and a heath of wondrous aroma.
About sunset we stopped at a small shed on the banks of the
Ukrina, where, seated among a group of Christian peasants, we
regaled ourselves with black coffee which was being dispensed at
the rate of about a farthing a small cup. Hard by, fixed over the
Ukrina stream, was a water-mill for grinding corn, of the most
primitive construction, an idea of which is best given by the
accompanying diagram. These turbines are universal throughout
Bosnia, and are to be also seen in Croatia.