Wouldst Buy a Fine Saddle? Here is the saddle makers' market in Scutari, Albania. You might just call it the "Transportation Exchange" of this city, which is commercially the center of Northern Albania. The buildings in the background are the Khans or inns, and besides them heaps of pack saddles. Horses, mules and donkeys, saddled ready for riding or for packing, stand in groups ready to return homeward after the bazaar. Albania has no roads of any general usefulness, so the pack animal does most of the transportation work. Here is seen the key to one of the chief difficulties which the American Red Cross has encountered in its relief work in the Balkans since the armistice. The roads are no good for motor transport, and the energetic American must conform himself to the lazy mule transport in his attempt to reach the suffering villages. There are few good ponies nowadays on account of the war; the mules are better but small, and the donkeys are like all of their kind the work over. Some of the American Red Cross "packtrains" in Albania have consisted of nearly fifty animals, and the sum total of their effort is about equal to one small motor camion. The saddles are not unlike the familiar American sawbuck, but more complicated. Their manufacture is really quite smart, so coventionalized that you can scarcely tell one from the other. The pattern is in fact the same from Albania to India
![[The Narrows, Lake George]. Albumen print, Getty Museum. Public domain photograph.](https://cache.getarchive.net/Prod/thumb/cdn25/L3Bob3RvLzE4NzAvMDEvMDEvdGhlLW5hcnJvd3MtbGFrZS1nZW9yZ2UtMDE4MjkzLTY0MC5qcGc%3D/40/20/webp "[The Narrows, Lake George]. Albumen print, Getty Museum. Public domain photograph.")
