e, which carried me a
generation back to the pashas of the old school." Hussein has since
retired from his government, to enjoy the immense fortune which he has
accumulated by commercial speculations--the last specimen of the
"malignant and turbaned Turk" of former days, whose war shout was heard
under the walls of Vienna; and who will now be replaced by a
smooth-faced hybrid in fez and frock-coat, waging a paper war with the
ambassadors of the _protecting_ powers in defence of the few sovereign
rights still permitted to the Porte--such is the Pasha of the present
day! The town of Widdin found even less favour in our traveller's eyes
than Roustchouk. "Lying so nicely on the bank of the Danube, which here
makes such beautiful curves, and marked on the map with capital letters,
it ought (such was my notion) to be a place having at least one
well-built and well-stocked bazar, a handsome seraglio, and some
good-looking mosques. Nothing of the sort;"--and thus, sorely
disappointed in his reasonable expectations, he proceeded on his way in
a car drawn by two horses, which in six hours brought him to the banks
of the Timok, the river which separates Servia from Bulgaria. The
Servian population, among whom he now first found himself, struck him as
a superior race, both physically and morally, compared with those whom
he had just left, possessing a manliness of address and demeanour
unknown to the serfs of Bulgaria; and, instead of the woolly caps and
frieze clothes of the latter, the peasants wore the red fez, and were
generally dressed in blue cloth. The plough cultivation of Bulgaria was
now exchanged for the innumerable herds of swine, which form the staple
commodity of Servia, fed in the immense oak woods which cover the
country. "They form" (as Mr Paget informs us in his work on Hungary) "a
very important article of trade between Servia and Vienna; and I doubt
if Smithfield could show better shapes or better feeding than the market
of a Servian village." Continuing his route along the banks of the
Danube to New Orsova, where he crossed to the Hungarian bank, he again
posted, with "an enormously stout Wallachian matron" for a travelling
companion, to Drenkova, whence another steamer conveyed him to Semlin,
and half an hour's pull down the Danube and up the Save (the line of the
two rivers being distinctly marked at the confluence by the muddy colour
of the former, and the clearness of the latter) landed him safe at
Belgrade.