CHAPTER XVIII.

DOWN THE DANUBE.-BIG WORDS IN HUNGARY.-ABSURD DRESS OF THE PEASANTS.-MUD AND MINERAL BATHS.-THROUGH BULGARIA ON FOOT.-OUT OF FUNDS.-LOOKING FOR WORK.

A FEW miles from Vienna the traveller down the Danube passes the island of Lobau. Here, in 1809, Napoleon and his. army of 150,000 men were locked for five days. It was a bad box, the swift Danube on both sides and the Austrians waiting to get at him; but the great captain was equal to the emergency. He threw bridges across the river, beat the enemy at Wagram, and came out victor where defeat had seemed inevitable.

From my place in the prow of the boat I saw traces of the French fortifications.

The boat landed at Buda-Pesth at nine o'clock. I at once set out in search of a cheap hotel. It was hard to find one. The Exposition was in progress, every place was full. I was finally forced to content myself with a bed in the attic of a secondrate inn, having to pay therefor the extortionate price of one gulden-forty cents-the highest price I had yet paid in Eu

rope.

The inhabitants of Buda - Pesth do not seem to bear the Austrians much love. They have their own coin, their own parliament, their own post-office department, and in general appear to have little in common with Austria. All the streets are marked with Hungarian names, the German equivalents having been removed a year or two ago by order of the government a patriotic action, perhaps, but hard on strangers. For instance, such names stare one in the face as,

"Szakirodalom," "Tejgazdasagj," "Varoshazter," "Wlasz

lovitsj."

The great market of the Hungarian capital is held on the bank of the Danube in front of the city. The situation is highly picturesque. Frowning guns look down from the fortress on the hill opposite, seven hundred feet high; near by is the palace of Maria Theresa; at either end of the city are the graceful arches of two great bridges. In the early morning the peasants begin to arrive from the country, usually bringing their wares on their backs, and spreading them out on the rough stones of the levee to await purchasers. The men wear an odd kind of dress the skirt, of some coarse cotton material, falling just below the knee, and a slouch hat and jacket of coarse white stuff. Some have their legs swathed in cloth up to the knee, a thick piece of leather being strapped under the foot à la sandal; the majority, however, go barefoot and barelegged. This is the every-day costume; their dress for feast-days is more gaudy. The greasy hat that has been in use perhaps ten years is replaced by a more fashionable affair only two or three years old, and decked with a gaudy rooster feather; the short jacket is of some bright-colored material, red, blue, or green; the knee-skirt is gayly trimmed. Altogether, the IIungarian peasant presents a novel spectacle when attired in his holiday dress.

The Ilungarian women also wear short dresses. When they wear any kind of foot-gear it is generally high boots. A red turban-like covering is worn on the head. Every morning by ten o'clock a thousand or more of these queer-looking people are collected on the river-bank. The men, with their dresses and feathers and greasy hats, stroll about chatting and flirting with the barelegged, red-cheeked women apparently never in a hurry, never seeming to have much business on hand. They look as though they had a thousand years before them as well as behind them. I bought some pears of a woman. She handed me back change. This act was not astonishing, but the manner in which she did it was astonishing. Her pocket was on the inner side of her dress; to get at it she lifted her dress considerably above her waist. Afterwards in other markets the

same thing occurred. I came to the conclusion that the women of the lower classes in Hungary are not sticklers for the rules of propriety.

In the celebrated mineral baths, maintained at expense of the Hungarian government, I saw men and women bathing together, no clothing of any kind and not the slightest sign of embarrassment among either sex. There were seventy or a hundred bathers in the pool at the time of my visit; about half of that number were women. While I was looking on, a young peasant-girl came in. She gave one glance at me, then proceeded to undress as unconcernedly as if I had been blind or a thousand miles away. She hung her clothes on a hook and waded out into the pool; there she splashed about in the water with the men, women, and children. I visited the mud baths. The water was almost as thick as mush. The bathers sit in that dirty slime hours at a time. It reminded me of the backwoods in America, where one sees hogs wallowing in mud.

The Exposition which was in progress at Buda-Pesth afforded an insight into the nature of the resources and products of Hungary. In articles made by hand they seem abreast with the age; where machinery is concerned they appear to be backward. There were no steam-ploughs, no steam brick-machines, weaving apparatuses, printing-presses, etc. Steam-ploughs and threshers seem almost unknown in Europe. I saw none in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, or Austria. In Russia I saw an American reaper. This was the nearest approach to the advanced American style of agricultural machinery that I saw in all Europe. Another thing in which Europe is behind America is in her newspapers. Vienna, for instance, a city as large as New York, has not a single paper as large, or with half the news, editorials, or general literature, as will be found in the papers of small American towns. One reason of this, perhaps, is the unwieldiness of their language. The words are so big it is a hopeless task to attempt to give much news in one sheet. As a sample of the intricate and involved style that the Germans love, I translate a sentence from a story which I read in

Buda-Pesth. I translate literally, word for word, in the order in which they come:

"And as the horse-dealer to him without him to answer the letter handed so clapped this worthy man to whom the shameful injustice which one at Tronkenburg upon him practised had on which consequences Herse even perhaps for the lifetime sick there lay, known was, upon the shoulder, and said to him," etc.*

The author starts out to say that a worthy man clapped a horse-dealer on the shoulder. He got his verb in at the right place, but the poor shoulder had to wait a long time to be clapped.

The fare from Buda-Pesth to Constantinople (second-class) is one hundred and ninety-one Austrian florins - seventy-six dollars and forty cents. I had less than sixty dollars in my pocket, yet I determined to make the trip. Steerage on the Danube to Rustschuck costs six dollars. Thence I could walk through Bulgaria to Varna on the Black Sea. Steerage from Varna to Constantinople costs two dollars and eighty cents. In this way transportation was to cost, all told, only eight dollars and eighty cents, leaving ample funds for living and seeing the country on the way. I bought ten pounds of bread, some cheese and sausage, and set out on the trip.

The departure from Buda-Pesth was at night. The long line of lights on both sides of the river twinkled and reflected on the water. The grim fortress loomed up from its lofty height black and forbidding. We bade the city good-by in silence, for the hour was late, and few people were astir as the boat glided from its moorings. When at midnight the lights of the Hungarian capital had completely faded away in the distance,

*The above sentence is from an historical romance called "Michael Kohlhaas." The sentence in the original runs thus:

"Und da der Roszhaendler ihm, ohne ihm zu antworten, den Brief ueberreichte, so klopfte dieser wuerdige Mann, dem die abscheuliche Ungerechtigkeit, die man auf der Tronkenburg an ihm veruebt hatte, an deren Folge Herse eben, vielleicht auf die Lebenszeit, krank danieder lag, bekannt war, auf die Schulter und sagte ihm," etc.

Uor M

I bethought myself of a place wherein to pass the night. The company was not select, the choice was not of two evils, but of a hundred. Bulgarian shepherds, Spanish Jews, Turks, Russians, Hungarians, and a dozen other nationalities, crowded the boat and disturbed the still night air with the Babel of many tongues. The best corners were already occupied, and I was forced to content myself with a space on the upper deck. The boards of the deck did not prove a soft bed, yet I could have slept there peacefully enough had not the Fates disturbed me. The moon became obscured by clouds, the wind increased, and about two o'clock in the morning the big drops of rain came dancing on my face. The balance of the night I spent downstairs under the cook's table, surrounded by my fellow-passengers. Of the lot, the Bulgarian shepherds looked the strangest and wildest. They dress, if not in skins, in something very like skins. A coarse white sail-cloth serves as a cloak; sail-cloth breeches come to their knees; to their feet are attached by leather thongs the rudest sort of sandals. They eat black bread and raw bacon, a diet at which the American plantation darkey, even in the days of slavery, would have rebelled. This coarse food seems to agree very well with these shaggy Bulgarian fellows. The bag which they carry slung over their shoulder invariably contains a huge hunk of raw bacon. The great pones of black bread are bought every two or three days as needed.

The Danube presents various sorts of scenery. From Linz to Vienna there are high hills, ruins, castles, curious towns. From Vienna to Buda-Pesth the same on a smaller scale. From Buda-Pesth on, the river winds its way through the vast Hungarian plains, where all is flat and dreary. Both the banks and the water are very muddy. One is at a loss to imagine Strauss's reason for calling his waltz the "Blue Danube." If he had styled it the "muddy" or the "yellow" Danube it would have. been more in keeping with the truth. There is no sign of “blueness" in the Danube from its source in Germany to its mouth at the distant Black Sea.

At intervals along this part of the journey the river is dotted