an Minnesota and
about twenty-five times as much corn as our three Pacific Coast states
combined. At frequent intervals we passed huge scarlet threshing
machines, most of them labeled "Made in U.S.A.," which were centers of
activity for hundreds of white-smocked peasants who were hauling in the
grain with ox-teams, feeding it into the voracious maws of the machines,
and piling the residue of straw into the largest stacks I have ever
seen. As we drew near the mountains the grain fields gave way to grazing
lands where great herds of cattle of various breeds--brindled milch
animals, massive cream-colored oxen, blue-gray buffalo with elephant
like hides and broad, curving horns, and gaunt steers that looked for
all the world like Texas longhorns--browsed amid the lush green grass.

Though the villages of the Wallachian plain are few and far between, and
though it is no uncommon thing for a peasant to walk a dozen miles from
his home to the fields in which he works, the whole region seemed a-hum
with industry. The Rumanian peasant, like his fellows below the Danube,
is, as a rule, a good-natured, easy-going though easily excited,
reasonably honest and extremely industrious fellow who labors from dawn
to darkness in six days of the week and spends the seventh in harmless
village carouses, chiefly characterized by dancing, music and the cheap
native wine. Rumania is one of the few countries in Europe where the
peasants still dress like the pictures on the postcards. The men wear
curly-brimmed shovel hats of black felt, like those affected by English
curates, and loose shirts of white linen, whose tails, instead of being
tucked into the trousers, flap freely about their legs, giving them the
appearance of having responded to an alarm of fire without waiting to
finish dressing. On Sundays and holidays men and women alike appear in
garments covered with the gorgeous needlework for which Rumania is
famous, some of the women's dresses being so heavily embroidered in gold
and silver that from a little distance the wearers look as though they
were enveloped in chain mail. A considerable and undesirable element of
Rumania's population consists of gipsies, whence their name of Romany,
or Rumani. The Rumanian gipsies, who are nomads and vagrants like their
kinsmen in the United States, are generally lazy, quarrelsome, dishonest
and untrustworthy, supporting themselves by horse-trading and
cattle-stealing or by their flocks and herds. We