s what the people like best--they swing into the strange,
rolling, passionate-melancholy music of the country. Wherever the
tzigany music comes from, it seems Hungarian, at any rate--fiery and
indolent and haphazard, rolling on without any particular rhyme or
reason, now piling up and now sinking indolently back as the waves roll
up and fall back on the sand. People will listen to it for hours, and
you can imagine one of those simpler daredevils--a hussar, for instance
--in his blue-braided jacket, red breeches, and big cavalry boots,
listening and drinking, and thinking of the fights he has won and the
girls he has lost, getting sorry for himself at last and breaking his
glass and weeping, and being very happy indeed.

There is a club in Budapest--at once a club and a luxurious villa almost
too crowded with rugs and fine furniture. When you go to play tennis,
instead of the ordinary locker-room one is ushered into a sort of
boudoir filled with Chippendale furniture. It is a delightful place to
get exercise, with tea served on a garden table between sets; yet, when
I was in Budapest, the place was almost deserted. It was not, it
seemed, the season that people came there, although just the season to
use such a place. For six weeks they came here, and nothing could bring
them back again. They did things only in spurts, so to speak: "They go
off on hunting trips to the ends of the earth, bring back animals for
the Zoo, then off to their country places and--flop! Then there is a
racing season, and they play polo and race for a while, then--flop!"

I have never seen such interesting photographers' show-windows as there
are in Budapest. Partly this is because the photographers are good, but
partly it must he in the Hungarians themselves--such vivid, interesting,
unconventional faces. These people look as if they ought to do the
acting and write the music and novels and plays and paint the pictures
for all the rest of the world. If they haven't done so, it must be
because, along with their natural talent, they have this indolence and
tendency to flop and not push things through.

It was this Budapest, so easy-going and cheerful, that came drifting
through the hospital windows, with the faint sound of band music that
Sunday afternoon.

On all the park benches and the paths winding up to the citadel, in a
hundred shady corners and walks, soldiers, with canes and bandages, were
sitting with their best girls, laughing