During the last month the attendance, I noticed, averaged from 130 to 150 a day—a very fair average for a town of some 35,000 inhabitants, where almost everybody is engaged in agriculture or trade, and where the proportion of people who can afford leisure time for reading during business hours must be extremely limited. The library is open from eight to twelve in the morning, and from two to eight in the afternoon, and as the Early Closing Movement is utterly unknown in Bulgaria, there can be little opportunity during these hours for any busy person to spend much time reading in the library.

All townspeople are permitted to borrow books from the library on making a small deposit; and I am assured by the librarian that delays or defaults in returning the books borrowed are of very rare occurrence. The Sobranje votes about ^400 yearly for the purchase of books ; but, with this exception, the whole expenses of the institution are defrayed by the municipality.

I drove out one afternoon during my stay at Philippopolis to visit the new waterworks, which form the chief improvement that the city has yet carried out There was till recently a great deal of fever here, which was attributed to the bad quality of the water supply. The water of the Maritza is supposed to be polluted by the town sewage, which percolates into the river.

Belgian firm of hydraulic engineers

Moreover, as a great part of the city is built on the rocky heights of which I have spoken, water from the Maritza had to be brought up in buckets. In order to obviate these defects, the town authorities decided, on the advice of an eminent Belgian firm of hydraulic engineers, to obtain their water from a mountain stream in the Rhodope Hills, at a distance of some ten miles from the city; the stream to be tapped at an elevation somewhat above the highest point of the hills of Philippopolis.

The site of the outtake is in a singularly picturesque mountain gorge. The water, after being diverted from the stream, passes through a number of tanks, where it is carefully filtered, and is then conveyed to Philippopolis by iron culverts. The scheme has proved a complete success as a means of supplying the town with a practically unlimited quantity of singularly fresh and clear water. There has been of late a very marked improvement in the healthiness of the city, though whether this improvement is post hoc or propter hoc I have no means of saying.

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