rvians,
Croatians and Low Hungarians, who huddle together in a rather
uncivilized manner. A fortress where there were many famous fights and
sieges in the times of the Turks occupies a summit a little higher than
Buda, so that in case of insurrection a few hot shot could be dropped
among the inhabitants. Curiously enough, however, there are thousands of
loyal Austrians, German by birth, living in Buda--or Ofen, as the
Teutons call it--whereas in Pesth, out of the two hundred thousand
inhabitants, scarcely three thousand are of Austrian birth. As long as
troops devoted to Francis Joseph hold Buda there is little chance for
the citizens of Pesth to succeed in revolt. Standing on the terrace of
the rare old palace on Buda's height, I looked down on Pesth with the
same range of vision that I should have had in a balloon. Every quarter
of the city would be fully exposed to an artillery fire from these
gigantic hills.

Buda is not rich in the modern improvements which render Pesth so
noticeable. I found no difficulty in some of the nooks and corners of
this quaint town in imagining myself back in the Middle Ages. Tottering
churches, immensely tall houses overhanging yawning and precipitous
alleys, markets set on little shelves in the mountain, hovels protesting
against sliding down into the valley, whither they seemed inevitably
doomed to go, succeeded one another in rapid panorama. Here were
costume, theatrical effect, artistic grouping: it was like Ragusa,
Spalatro and Sebenico. Old and young women sat on the ground in the
markets, as our negroes do in Lynchburg in Virginia: they held up fruit
and vegetables and shrieked out the prices in a dialect which seemed a
compound of Hungarian and German. Austrian soldiers and Hungarian
recruits, the former clad in brown jackets and blue hose, the latter in
buff doublets and red trousers, and wearing feathers in their caps,
marched and countermarched, apparently going nowhere in particular, but
merely keeping up discipline by means of exercise.

The emperor comes often to the fine palace on Buda hill, and sallies
forth from it to hunt with some of the nobles on their immense estates.
The empress is passionately fond of Hungary, and spends no small portion
of her time there. The Hungarians receive this consideration from their
sovereign lady as very natural, and speak of her as a person of great
good sense. The German and Slavic citizens of Austria say that there are
but two failin