oles to thwart the Germans, the Hungarians to check all the others,
and the Croats to defeat the Hungarians. From this has resulted a
deplorable conflict of races. The present emperor, Francis Joseph,
appears to the eye of the close observer a man bent beneath the
hopeless task of reconciliation. He is called upon to bear the
accumulated evils of centuries of misrule.

Vienna is a faithful reflex in miniature of Austria in general. The
heedless or untrained tourist, misled by names and language and the
outward forms of intercourse, may pronounce the city a most delightful
German capital: he may congratulate himself upon the opportunity it
gives him of reviving his reminiscences of the old German emperors and
contrasting their times with the present. But the tourist, were he
to go beneath the surface, would discover that he is treading
upon peculiar ground. We have only to scratch the Viennese to find
something that is not German. We shall discover beneath the surface
Hungarian, or Slavic, or Italian blood. A very large portion of the
population, perhaps even the greater portion, speaks two, three or
four languages with equal facility. New York excepted, no great city
will compare with Vienna for medley of speech and race. The truth is,
that the city still retains its early character as a frontier-post,
or, to speak more correctly, it is the focus where the currents from
North-eastern Italy, South-eastern Germany, Bohemia, Galicia and
Hungary converge without thoroughly intermingling. The conventional
German used by the middle and lower classes is interspersed with
terms borrowed from the other languages, with dialectic idioms,
provincialisms and peculiarities of pronunciation that cause it to
sound like an unfamiliar tongue.

In outward appearance the city is not less diversified than in
population. The gay bustle of the streets, the incessant roll of
fiacres, the style of dress, the crowded cafes remind one more
of Paris than of Germany. The cuisine and ways of living and the
architecture here and there have borrowed freely from Italy and
France. A certain fondness for gorgeous coloring and profuse
ornamentation is due to Hungarian influence. The bulbous cupolas
surmounted with sharply tapering spires, irreverently nicknamed
_Zwiebel-Thuerme_ ("onion-towers"), are evidently stragglers from
Byzantium, and contrast sharply with the rich Gothic of St. Stephen's
and the new Votive Church. By the side of Vienna, Berlin is