another time if I must sleep in my hammock, it would be
better to see that the head was higher than the feet.

"It does not make any difference to me," I replied cheerfully, "I am as
fresh as a lark."

There was no time for further discussion, for our breakfast was ready (a
very bad breakfast it was, too), and the vehicle we had chartered the
night before was also waiting to convey us some miles into the interior
of the country, to the soda manufactory at Boeska. On our way we passed
through the village of Karasconfalu, inhabited entirely by Polish Jews.
The dirt and squalor of this place beggar description. The dwellings are
not houses, but are simply holes burrowed in the sandbanks, with an
upright stone set up in front to represent a door; windows and chimneys
are unknown. If it were not for a few erections more like ordinary human
habitations, the place might have passed for a gigantic rabbit-warren.
As we drove through we saw some of the villagers engaged in slaughtering
calves and sheep in the middle of the road, the blood running down into
a self-made gutter; it was a sickening sight. The people themselves have
a most peculiar physiognomy, especially the men, who in addition to long
beards wear corkscrew ringlets, which give them a very odd appearance.
Their principal garment is a kind of long brown dressing-gown, which in
its filthy grimness suits the wearer down to the ground. The feet are
bound up in thongs of leather. The shoemaker's trade is apparently
unknown in these parts. The inhabitants of this delightful village have
the reputation of being a set of born cheats and swindlers; if it is
true, then certainly the moral is plain, that dishonesty is not a
thriving trade. The fact is, being all of one sort, the profession is
overcrowded, and the result is that the sharpest amongst them emigrate,
or rather I should say go farther a-field to exercise their craft. I am
told that many of the low Jews, who make themselves a byword and a
reproach by their practices of cheating and usury throughout Hungary,
may be traced back to this foul nest in the Marmaros Mountains. It would
be well for the credit of the Jewish community in Hungary, as well as
elsewhere, if something were done to raise these people out of the utter
degradation which surrounds them from their birth.

Not far beyond Karasconfalu we came upon Boeska, situated in the midst
of the most beautiful and romantic scenery, not at all suggestive of the
n