are removed on these occasions. Hares are not
preserved in the Tokay district, but they are pretty numerous. I myself
shot fifty-four in the space of a few weeks, which is nothing compared
to an English battue of a single day; but then this is sport, and there
is immense pleasure in dashing right across country behind a pair of
fleet horses, thinking yourself well repaid if you bag a couple or three
hares in the afternoon's scamper. For wolf and wild-boar hunting one
must penetrate into the forests which extend in the rear of the
southern slopes of this Tokay range of hills.

During my stay at G---- a party was got up for a few days' shooting in
the interior. On this occasion we were to shoot in Baron Beust's
forests, which extend over an area of about forty miles square; as it
may be supposed, the sport is not the easy affair it is in the
well-stocked parks of Bohemia.

There was not snow enough for sledging, so we drove to the rendezvous on
wheels, using the springless carts of the country, the roads being far
too rough for ordinary carriages. Wrapped in our _bundas_, we were proof
against the cold. The wolf-skin collar turned up rises above the head
and forms a capital protection; and very necessary it was on this
occasion, for there was a keen cutting wind the day we started.

I carried a smooth-bore breechloader charged with the largest buck-shot
in one barrel and with a bullet in the other. In Hungary the forests are
usually so thick that one scarcely ever fires at a long range, and heavy
shot at a short distance in a thicket is better than a bullet. After
driving in a break-neck fashion for about two hours we arrived at the
river Bodrog, a tributary of the Theiss. Nearly every winter the country
hereabouts is under water; I remember once seeing it when there was all
the appearance of an extensive inland sea. Sometimes the inundations are
disastrous, but the ordinary flood is an accepted event, and no damage
accrues beyond the prevalence of marsh fever in April and May, when the
water recedes. This part of the country offers first-rate
wildfowl-shooting in the season.

Everywhere in Hungary the different races are strangely mixed up
together: the Tokay Hegyalia, it is true, is chiefly peopled by Magyars,
and the language is said to be the purest Magyar spoken anywhere; but
there are Slavs and Jews amongst them, and our drive of twenty miles
brought us into an area where the Slavs predominate. The difference of