In the Herzegovina

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The “casino” of the officers is in the hotel, and I spent the evening pleasantly in their society. Austrian officers are noted for their hospitality. One of the young men was born in the same town in Sclavonia as Nikola Tesla, and spoke with much pride of the success that his countryman was achieving in America. “Those Sclavonians are all proud of Tesla,” said a Hungarian lieutenant good-naturedly, “because he is the first of the race that ever invented anything. The majority of them can’t make a mouse trap.” Invention, the Sclavonian acknowledged, was not the forte of his people; they were rather impractical, more given to poetry and sentiment than to mechanics. Goethe, he said, studied their language for a year that he might read their poetry, of which he was very fond. If there be any one thing at which they are adepts, it is the learning of a language; many of the distinguished linguists, he claimed, were of Sclavonian stock.

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