Some Reminiscences of Eastern Europe

I.

ON THE DANUBE.

A LONG spring day upon the Danube ; an early start from Vienna, under a cloudless but delicately hazy sky that forebodes hot weather ashore for the season, — April 8, 1894, — though out in midstream, after we have emerged from the canal which skirts the Prater, and fairly embarked upon our eastward voyage, the breeze blows crisp and cool. Close to so populous a city, and moving along one of the world’s great water highways, one wonders at the seeming solitude of the river-banks and the soft monotony of the prospect. The great stream lays itself out lazily, embracing with its wide-flung arms numbers of willowy islands, appearing even to lag and loiter in its course, though we know that the hidden currents are terrifically strong.

Towns of the first rank upon the Danube, between Vienna and Budapest, there are none ; and even the modest little villages keep well back from the treacherous edge of the tremendous flood, peeping through groves of sheeny white aspens and elms not yet in leaf, or lifting the round belfries of their ugly little churches over the first low range of hills. Still less are there any visible monuments to mark the fact that we are passing one of the world’s most famous arenas, the sanguinary Marchfeld, which fairly teems with reminiscences of

For it was here that Rudolf of Hapsburg defeated Ottocar of Bohemia, and so laid the foundations of the Austrian Empire. Hitherto, but no farther, came the last great wave of Mohammedan invasion in the seventeenth century. Here the ancestral sceptre was all but wrenched out of Austria’s hands by the first Napoleon, on the fierce days of Aspern, Essling. and Wagram, — days not yet a hundred years gone by, and lately restored for us with startling reality in the naïf pages of General Marbot. Here again, upon the right bank of the stream, in the very dawn of our era, the Eastern barbarian, whose hour was not yet come, fell back before the advance of the Roman eagles ; here, to celebrate the conquest of Pannonia, Augustus built an edifice that still exists under the name of the Heathen Tower, and the great Roman city of Caruntum arose and flourished for a few hundred years, until suddenly effaced by the Scourge of God. Here, too, by the selfsame monotonous route of the full but featureless river, came Marcus Aurelius to the conquest of the Quadi, and to those long nights in camp, of starless and solitary vigil, when the Thoughts visited him which have supplied courage to his spiritual progeny for all the ages since. “ His ennui was infinite,” says Renan, “ but he knew how to endure it all.”

If, however, the borders of the Danube hereabout are tame in outline, there is no end, in this hour of bursting leafage, to the beauty of their color. The willows along the river’s edge make a continuous flame of light, clear green. The grass, by contrast, deepens into emerald. The frequent groves that clothe the gentle slopes beyond show every conceivable nuance of luminous umber, primrose yellow, and warm olive gray; these mellow tints all mingling in the distance, and seeming to dissolve into the universal golden mist that suffuses the wide horizon. The sky is blue at the zenith only. The vast and incessantly widening river, belying its fame in song and story, is never blue at all, but clear umber or beryl green. The only time I ever came this way before, it was high summer, and the sky was overcast, and the foliage along the banks parched and dusty. Why, then, should all this glad and lucent color strike me as so strangely familiar ? What ethereal and elusive memory is this that the slowly unrolling panorama awakens of the desperately long ago ? A vision — a cadence — a rhyme — I have it ! Certain fugitive stanzas, forgotten for God knows how many years, but which captivated my fancy as a child, and on which I doted with unreasoning admiration. I used to go about singing them, I remember, to a foolish little tune of my own making, or stealing, that moved like an old-fashioned three-time waltz, and comes back along with the words : —

Not such very bad poetry, after all! The stanzas glow with life and sunshine, and I find a simple distinction about them still that agreeably justifies my juvenile preference. Whoever among my possible readers may chance to know their author’s name and where to find them, which I certainly do not, may very likely be able to correct, in some trifling points, my transcription from memory.

Here, meanwhile, is the identical scene that they foretold to my young imagination, and I wonder I did not recognize it on that other voyage to Budapest. The eminence described with vague romanticism as the “ Danube’s height ” was, no doubt, the Bisamberg, which overlooks the Marchfeld ; but of the fountain under the thorn-tree I find no longer any trace in local nomenclature.

The “ mountains of the Hun ” loom suddenly upon the horizon, about an hour’s sail from Vienna, and come trooping down toward the river at Presburg, much as the gallant Hungarian gentry rallied to the same spot, a century and a half ago, in defense of their menaced “king,” Maria Theresa. At that time there was a stately and well - fortified royal palace on the high hill of Presburg, which remained intact until destroyed by fire in 1811. Or rather, it was not completely destroyed, but reduced in a day to the condition of a very striking ruin ; for the blackened walls and corner towers of the great quadrangle still crown the height and predominate over the modern town.

It was in the cathedral of Presburg that the kings of Hungary used always to be invested with that primitive regalia of St. Stephen, the massive sceptre and the iron crown, regarded by all true Magyars with a kind of mystic devotion ; defended, stolen, reclaimed, concealed, discovered, buried, and rediscovered through a series of incredibly romantic accidents and adventures extending over some thousand years. Now that Austria and Hungary are ostensibly one and indivisible, these historic gewgaws are kept in the castle of Buda, under so strict a guard that it is next to impossible to get a glimpse of them; while as for the artificial mound near the end of the bridge that here spans the contracted river, up which the newly crowned monarch used to ride and wave his drawn sword to the four points of the compass, as a sign that he would defend his realm from dangers upon every side, it has long since been leveled before the march of modern improvement. They tell me that one of the chief distinctions of Presburg to the man of to-day is the possession of an ideal restaurant; one of those establishments that do indeed add a steady and benign lustre to the crown of the dual empire ; where eating and drinking become a pious function, and the art of cookery touches the sublime. One takes a return ticket from Vienna to Presburg now, not to revel in a vision of the fair young empress in her weeds and the plumed and jeweled glories of the Hungarian “ insurrection,” ¹ but purely and simply to go and dine and return.

Beyond Presburg the hills recede as suddenly as they assembled, and the river once more widens greatly over a level tract of country. It is here that we begin to notice one of the most picturesque and peculiar features of the Donaufahrt, the floating grain mills, of which we shall see hundreds before the day is done. They are all constructed on exactly the same principle as those which Belisarius set up in the Tiber during the siege of Rome in the sixth century. Two solid, flat-bottomed boats are anchored side by side. A huge waterwheel, with floats, is suspended and revolves between them, the grinding-machinery being protected by a shelter-hut on the boat that lies nearest the shore. The miller’s white figure passes and repasses across the dark doorway of this hut. Another man, and very likely a dog, lie asleep in the sunshine outside. The tiny skiff which took them over from the mainland is tied loosely to the prow of one of the anchored boats, and bounds lightly over the long green billow that is lifted by our passing steamer.

Where the river Raab falls in upon our right, the town of the same name being twelve miles inland and far out of sight, we mark for the first time, amid the idle groups that lounge about the steamboat-landing, tall peasant forms, in dirty sheepskin cloaks and leggings, with straight hair of raven gloss, swarthy skins, high cheek-bones, and eyes of sparkling jet. These men are no longer of Europe. There is no perceptible trace about them whether of Latin or of Teuton. Nor is theirs exactly the gypsy type, though the country whose frontier we have crossed abounds, we know, in those mysterious nomads. The obvious resemblance of the Hungarian peasant pur sang is to the higher types of the North American Indian ; and there have even been fanciful philologists who maintained that the true affinity of the comparatively isolated Hungarian language is with the strange, indigenous dialects of that New World which is the Old. But what will not a fanciful philologist maintain ?

From this point onward, throughout the “ all-golden afternoon,” our republican party impresses itself to remember that we are moving among the last and most fiercely contested battlefields of the Hungarian war of independence. Here they fought, only forty-five year’s ago, and here they seemed most tragically to fail, those reckless idealists, belated heroes of an epic mould ; never dreaming that they were in at the death of an era, that the principle for which they exulted to perish would soon cease to be accounted sacred, and that only after their cause was lost could their ends be won. The single man among the leaders of that day sagacious enough to divine something of all this would now appear to have been Arthur Görgey, one of the ablest of the patriot generals, who capitulated and surrendered a hitherto victorious army immediately after Russia had intervened on the Austrian side. He was cursed as the blackest of traitors by the remnant of his own party, and later, under stress of the passionate appeals for sympathy of his exiled comrades, by the whole civilized world of the west. One remembers hearing, as a child, the thrilling legend of the Honvéds, or Hungarian cavalrymen, who shot themselves in the ranks rather than lay down their arms on the bitter day of the capitulation. Yet now, after almost half a century, one questions whether, in truth, that hastily branded soldier had not a clearer prevision of his country’s needs, a saner grasp of her possibilities, than the indomitable and impracticable old rebel of ninety who has just breathed his last at Turin, Louis Kossuth, of the godlike, youthful presence and the golden tongue.

The great fortress of Komorn, on the left bank of the Danube, was held by the patriots under General Klapka up to the time of Görgey’s surrender, but had, of course, to be yielded then. They say, in fact, that it has never been captured at all, and cannot be; that it is one of the very few strongholds of the world which may be described with literal truth as impregnable. To the uninitiated eye it is not in the least imposing, a mere assemblage of earthworks, and the might of Komorn lies in its position.

As the sun descends through the clear spaces of a crocus-colored sky, we approach the finest point in this section of the Danube, Gran, the seat of the primate of Hungary. The wayward river, whose direction from Vienna has been mainly eastward, here makes a last abrupt bend or loop toward the north before turning its course definitively toward the Pontic Sea, and the cathedral stands high upon a noble promontory nearly encircled by the golden flood. It is not a venerable church, dating only from the early part of the present century, but it was built on a magnificent scale and at great cost, the revenues of the see having been about a hundred thousand pounds sterling before they were cut down one half by the reforming Hungarian diet of 1848, and its effect is curiously imposing. With its central dome and wide façade and two tall flanking towers, it looks much more like a Greek than like a Latin church, and appeals to the fancy as the visible gateway of the East. Hard by stands the archbishop’s palace, an object only less grand and conspicuous than the cathedral, and the great curve of the river enables one, after almost circumnavigating the point that they crown, to look back and see these two structures for a marvelous distance, with their admirably massed outlines clearly defined against the evening sky. There is also a group of very tall and slender trees on the spit of low land at the foot of the promontory ; pollarded poplars, most likely, but which take on, in the glowing dusk, a vague resemblance to palms, and so assist the Oriental illusion.

All at once the night infolds us. Mists begin to muffle the river-banks and thin vapors to obscure the stars. The dizzy six-story tower of the mediæval castle of Visegräd is barely discernible as we glide beneath it, and the voyage becomes a mere dreamy sameness of rushing waters between invisible shores. It is eight o’clock in the evening when the renowned view of the twin cities of Buda and Pesth as approached from the Danube — really one of the most magnificent that Europe has to show — resolves itself into terrestrial constellations of gaslights on this side and on that, studding like stars the tall pyramid of the Blocksberg on the right, and running in long lines of fire down the quays of the modern capital on the left, their yellow radiance overpowered and extinguished at intervals by a blazing blue planet of calcium or electric light.

II.

THE KOSSUTH LEGEND.

Our first move, on awaking the next morning, was to run to our high front windows, in the sumptuous Hotel Hungaria, for a glance at the dramatic view, so well remembered, of the crowded quays, the sealike river, and the phenomenally long bridges, with a stern old castle and a shining modern palace looking superciliously down from their respective eminences beyond the stream. But for all the visionary beauty of the vernal day, and the clear green of the leafage in Buda’s palace gardens and along the tree-planted embankments on either side of the river, we experienced a shade of disappointment. The stately dual city appeared indefinitely more commonplace than of old, and our subsequent explorations convinced us that here, as in some places nearer home, effect is being ruthlessly sacrificed to enterprise ; and that Budapest (as it is now the fashion to write it) is, in fact, suffering from a peculiarly malignant attack of the fever for modern “ progress.” The mighty Danube is presently to be fettered by two more iron bridges, and the last of the pretty, low, old-fashioned family mansions, with their smiling courtyards, their double ranges of dormer-windows along the street front, and the bright brass knockers on their hospitable doors, will soon have given place to a seven-story structure in yellow stone, surmounted by fantastic iron spires, and rearing at the angle of the busy street a queer, balloonlike cupola. The electric light is everywhere, even at the head of one’s bed in the grand hotel, as a palliative, no doubt, to the inevitable insomnia of so stirring a time ; and the electric tram is rushing on. There is no help for all this even if one were fully minded to help it ; and it so chanced that we also encountered at every step, upon that April morning, certain moving reminders of a more romantic past ; for we had provokingly missed, and that by a few days only, one of the most striking and suggestive pageants of the century’s end, the public obsequies of Kossuth Lajos. The greater part of the streets and public buildings of Budapest were still in mourning for him. Black-edged posters and programmes upon the walls announced, in the most inscrutable language of the civilized world, the order of the old patriot’s funeral procession, and the wild native music that had been selected to accompany its march. In one or another shop window, crowned with laurel or swathed in crape, one saw his portrait at every stage of his fabulously long career: now as a beautiful and dreamy child ; now as a smart young official of the thirties, with whiskered cheeks and braided surtout; now wearing the black velvet and shadowy plumes, and the air of tragic distinction with which he subjugated England and America in 1851 and 1852 ; afterwards as an old, and then a very old man, in a nimbus of thick white hair, sad and stern, one might almost say stubborn, but keen and vigilant always. “ Late, late in the gloaming ” of the century with which he was so nearly coeval, the exile of almost fifty years, the clarion-voiced orator who had once made two hemispheres ring with the story of his country’s wrongs, had come back silent and cold. To the very last of earth, he had been rigid, irreconcilable, incredulous of the regeneration he had done so much to effect. We heard the funeral eloquently described, and all the bearings of the scene discussed with great animation and acumen, one evening before we left Budapest, in a circle comprising some of the most active minds, both men and women, of the new generation. They said it gave one a vivid notion of what a barbarian incursion must have looked like, to see the hordes of semi-savage men who came pouring into the trim capital from the remotest recesses of Hungary for that solemn function. There were shepherds from the puzta and miners from the mountains, folk in elf locks and shaggy mantles, with flaming eyes, uncouth gestures, and barely intelligible speech, defiant of the anxious officials who strove to regulate their movements, yet all melted by a common emotion, bowed by a common sorrow, and bringing — most affecting circumstance of all — from every county in the kingdom a handful of earth to fling into the open grave. Most of our friends spoke English so much better than we spoke anything else that it afforded us a certain consolation when one Herr Professor (but he, I think, was of German extraction) testified to the agitation of the assembled thousands in these ingenuous terms: “ Zey veep ! Ze nation veep ! I hear tell. I did not believe. So I make — what you call ze cortége ? — from here to ze cimetar, und dere vere zey all, mit larmes ! ”

“ Ah yes,” answered our sympathetic hostess rather sadly. (Her faultless English was to some extent explainable by the fact that her parents were living as exiles in London through all her schoolgirl years.) “ It was so, and they were sincere. And yet they hardly knew for whom the muffled drums were beating. Only the aged, and of those, of course, but few, had ever seen him in life. To me and my brothers, the old hero, though dimly remembered, was still a reality. We had sat on his knee and heard that matchless voice of his ; long after the great days, to be sure, when our father was in banishment in England. But to the majority of those wild folk he was merely the tutelary genius of an imaginary state ; a sort of demigod, to whom it was meet and prudent to bring a pious offering on the day of his festa. He had been a legend in his own adored fatherland for a full generation before he passed away.”

“ But that was his own fault,” some one objected. “ He might have come back years ago, if he would have bated one jot of his impossible pretensions, made the simplest and most reasonable concessions ! He might have come hack and seen, as the Scripture says, ‘ his children’s children and peace upon Israel.’ ”

“ He had no faith,” she answered, “ in the validity of our peace. He would have said, in some transcendental sense of his own ” (and she, too, quoted textually from the English Bible), “ ‘I am for peace ; but when I speak, lo, they are for war,’ — meaning by ‘ they ’ moderate liberals, like our ignoble selves. He was a born irreconcilable: wrathfully useless in common, compromising times like these ; fully himself, quite clear and at rest, only in the quiet centre of terrific storm.”

“ And then we must never forget,” added another voice, “ that there were two irreconcilables. The Emperor was just as bad. He vehemently refused, at first, to admit even the dust of Kossuth into Hungary, and yielded only to a sharp sense of expediency. The Emperor and the outlaw, — those two remembered all. They stood facing each other gloomily upon their severed heights, while the swollen stream of socalled progress tore its turbid way between them. Men do sometimes outlive themselves in this way, though not often for so many years. But the legend, — that endures from generation to generation.”

III.

THE QUARNERO.

In the white dawn of a certain summerlike morning, after a fifteen-hours’ railway journey southwestward from Budapest, we got our strange, visionary, first glimpse of a hitherto unknown country. Twilight had closed in upon us amid the pleasant Croatian villages, where the long, low mud cottages, with their thatched verandas, are made spick and span with whitewash, and the tidy little gardens, now in mid-April, were sweet with peach and cherry bloom. At midnight our train had halted for half an hour in a smart new station, flaming with electric light, at Agram, the capital of Croatia. The modern town is built at the foot of a hill that almost deserves to be called a mountain, and of which the outline looked majestic under a crescent moon. But of the cathedral, and the ancient archiepiscopal city standing high upon the hillside, we could see nothing at all, except a line of lights bordering a sinuous roadway, that had the effect of a huge fiery serpent wriggling along the slope. So we rattled on, until we finally awoke from the troubled slumbers of the train to find ourselves laboring slowly up the last, steep grades of the mountain range that prolongs itself into the promontory of Istria.

It was a weird-looking world upon which our eyes opened, — treeless, and almost herbless ; where fantastic shapes of ash-colored rock thrust themselves up out of a vivid red soil, while far, far below us, to the right, we could just discern a slender line of white breakers upon a sandy beach, and the vague purple of the Adriatic. Trieste lay that way, and Treviso, and Aquileia, and Venice, and all the dear, familiar world of Italy. But we, when we had passed the height of land, rattled rapidly down among terraced vineyards and twinkling little white towns to Fiume on the Gulf of Quarnero.

Fiume, in the territory of Croatia, is the single seaport that naturally appertains to the folk beyond the Leitha ; and the one consuming ambition of the place is to surpass and extinguish Trieste, which is essentially Austrian. Now, all the world has associations of one kind or another with Trieste, derived largely, it may be, from Lever’s later novels and the yet more sensational Burton Memoirs, but still interesting and concrete. What Fiume proposes to do, if enterprise, enthusiasm, and a reckless expenditure of money in self-advertisement and selfadornment can effect it, is to divert the world’s attention to herself. The harbor is, no doubt, both beautiful and commodious, and more convenient for trade with the Orient than the more famous port on the further side of the peninsula. It is thronged, at all events, with graceful shipping ; and fishing-boats with dull yellow sails lie lazily about, while smart little local steamers dart like dragonflies across the blue water, and in and out among the bluer islands of the gulf, — Cherso, Vaglio, Lussin, and the rest. The afternoon sky, especially, is full of light, the high Istrian coast stretching away across the sunset in a lovely line ; while Abbazia, with its terraced gardens and palatial villas, glorified at this moment by the presence of German royalty, blazes with varied color along the water’s edge. All the quays and moles and water-side warehouses of Fiume appear to be brand-new, solid, and handsome. The Hôtel de l’Europe is built so close to the sea that we can almost step from our own door on board one of the boats that ply hourly between tbe port and Abbazia ; and we tell the time during the night-watches by the bells on a huge Glasgow steamer which is unlading a cargo of jute from Calcutta beneath our very windows. Our interest in this performance had been wrought up to such a pitch, and we had become so familiar with the personnel of the crew, that when, on a fine, festive Sunday morning, one of the engineers tumbled casually overboard, our agitation and suspense were extreme. They were soon relieved. A pair of natives who happened to be passing dropped easily into a boat, and fished up the bewildered Jack Tar quite at their leisure ; the while a motley crowd collected on the quay, recruited from all the nations, and shrieking in one breath all the lingoes of the known world. High above this babel of ineffectual speech presently sprang the sharp and naughty expletives of one of the ship’s officers, who scolded the dripping sailor for his awkwardness, while he cynically underrated the value of the service performed by the Italian boatmen who had rescued him. But he ended by adjusting, after some abatement, their claim for remuneration.

Confusion of tongues is, in fact, constant at Fiume. The majority of the population is really Italian in race and language ; but the Hungarian and Croatian dialects — not in the least related to each other, by the way — strive hard to establish an ascendency ; and German is an accomplishment that is negligently affected by all classes. Italian serves one best, however, in the shops and restaurants, and among the sympathetic and communicative boatmen.

And Fiume is not all painfully modern. There are villas with entrancing old gardens on the noble semicircle of hills that infolds the port, and the canal by which the town’s eponymous river, the Fiumara, enters the sea has its borders overshadowed by venerable though still vigorous plane-trees, beneath whose broad canopy, on a market-day, booths are set up for the sale of the most miscellaneous articles. Here are exposed prints and ginghams and gay silk handkerchiefs, objets de piété, oranges from Turkey, and large, fair apples from north Hungary, red, yellow, and russet, and so very like some of our most cherished old New England varieties that the effect is quite bewildering. One may also become possessed, at a moderate cost, of a most attractive kind of shoe, with a wooden sole and a leather top, gayly embroidered, and tied with scarlet woolen tassels. In the regular market - place, upon a Saturday, fish and fowl are sold alive, and also a particularly ferociouslooking crab, resembling a young devilfish in size and expression of countenance, and evidently esteemed a luxury. The market-place is at one end of the shady quay aforesaid ; the canal is so closely packed with boats having their gay sails closely furled that it is a marvel how one of them ever gets out of it ; and at the other end of the quay is a small paved piazza, whence one passes under an archway, and climbs, if so minded, the four hundred and eleven stone steps which lead to the far-famed sanctuary of Tersatto.

That steep and toilsome acclivity can never have lacked pilgrims in the days when the old plane-trees below were in their prime. For did not the House of Nazareth pause here upon the mountain top from the 12th of May, 1291, to the 10th of December, 1294, when it moved on, with its angel guard, across the Adriatic, and found its final rest at Loretto ? The Counts Niccolò and Martino Frangipani, lords of the fine old feudal castle hard by, whose machicolated towers look down into the deep ravine of the Fiumara, had at any rate ample opportunity to behold and attest the miracle ; and it was they who built the memorial church, now transformed by restoration out of all its original semblance, where for exactly six hundred years the sailors of the Adriatic have been paying their vows to Mary, Star of the Deep. Even Sir Richard Burton, that expert in so many religions, had a great reverence for the shrine of Tersatto, and used — so his wife tells us in her memoir — to come over from Trieste, where he was consul for so many years, and arrange all his more perplexing affairs with the benign Madonna here. But the pious fable, one surmises, has pretty well lost its power over the wide-awake population that shouts its astonishing polyglot along the noisy marina of Fiume.

A great many short excursions may be made from Fiume. You may go any day to Ika or Louranna in Istria, or to exquisite little Buccari, in its green and deeply sheltered bay, upon the Croatian mainland. But the most interesting of the water-trips from this point occupies two days, and can be made on a Wednesday only. Accordingly, we embark, at six A. M., upon a smallish boat, for the southern extremity of the island of Lussin, where the twin ports of Lussinpiccolo and Lussingrande seem to have been so distinguished by Italian ingenuity because the former is about twice as large as the latter. It is an eight-hours’ sail to Lussin, and after the morning mists have lifted the day becomes for a time divinely fair. The shores look a little pallid under the light spring haze, but their outlines are beautiful and perpetually changing. Some of the long hillsides are indeed rather desolate in aspect, for they were terraced at some time with immense labor; but either the vines for which the ground was thus prepared were never set there at all, or they have been uprooted since the visitation of the phylloxera. A lighthouse, a hoary and hollow-eyed castle, a coast-guard station, a crumbling watch-tower, a “ little gray church on a wind-swept hill,” — such are all the incidents of our calm voyage. But they suffice for our divertimento, and when the fort is at last pointed out that defends the mouth of the harbor of Lussinpiccolo, we wonder how the hours can have passed so quickly.

There is an elbow-like bend in the narrow channel by which we enter the port, and the instant we have rounded this the dreaming world seems to awake. A brisk breeze that we did not feel at all outside flecks with spray the dark blue waters of the basin ; small pleasureboats, admirably handled, are darting hither and thither, their white sails almost dipping as they fly. The houses that front the marina are many-colored, and their gardens are flaunting with flowers. There are even some pert Parisian toilettes to be discerned amid the noble old costumes of the fishwives and marketwomen ; for Lussinpiccolo is coming into notice as a winter station, and the Viennese physicians have ordered a delicate archduchess hither, for the months of February and March, these three successive years. Hence German restaurants where weisses Bier and Wienerschnitzel never fail, and plenty of clean, fairly furnished lodgings like that which we presently secure for the night above the principal linen-draper’s shop of Lussinpiccolo. The costume of the women here has one charming peculiarity: beside the short, wide stuff skirts, usually dark blue, the bright-hued belts and aprons, the sleeveless jackets, white blouses with bishop sleeves, and necklaces of beads in many rows, that are common all along the coast, many of the Lussinese wear a head-dress consisting of a long white linen scarf fringed and finished with open needlework at the ends, which they twist about their small, sleek heads so as to produce the effect of a huge chaplet or a Turkish turban, and then gather into an intricate knot at one side, letting the ends fall behind. They are a tall race, with broad hips and shoulders and classically massive necks. The turban helps, doubtless, to support the great weights which they carry on the head, and, like most women accustomed from childhood to this form of gymnastics, they carry themselves superbly.

Between the relays of breaded veal cutlets on which we both lunched and dined, we had a fascinating walk of two miles or so, by a broad and easy path along the coast, now mounting among the olive orchards, now descending to the margin of the silent sapphire coves, to Lussingrande. It is very like the Mediterranean riviera, yet with a difference. The olive-trees here are not silvery, like those of Italy, — their color actually approaches more nearly to that of the ilex, — and there is no majestic mountain background, and there are no palms as yet. But there is wonderful balm in the air, and a certain sweet, wistful transparency. Vegetation is more than three weeks farther advanced than on the mainland. The earliest flowers and vegetables are quite gone by, and we see figs that cannot help coming to maturity almost a month earlier than one looks for them in Tuscany.

Lussingrande disclosed itself at the sharp turning of a headland, exactly like a scene in the opera, — another partycolored little town with steep streets and vine-hung terraces. A very deep and narrow basin held a fleet of butterfly boats ; while the white church stands high and detached on a promontory that is almost an island, with its campanile set strangely at a considerable distance from the main building, like a lighthouse on the outermost rock. After some exploration of the town and a satisfactory experiment with its caffé nero, we left one of our trio sketching outside, while we crossed the narrow isthmus, and strayed idly into the open church, not in the least looking for what we were to find. For there, in that obscure and otherwise undistinguished little temple, we came suddenly upon the gorgeous trail of sovereign Venice. The pavement was in squares of Istrian marble, alternate pink and cream-white ; the altar steps were all pink, — some of the finest slabs I have ever seen, — and there was an altarpiece of extreme beauty, attributed, as we afterward learned, to Vivarini. The enthroned Madonna was that selfsame grave and mild Venetian maiden whom all the men of the Bellini school so loved to paint, but the heads of some of the adoring saints were very virile and noble, and plainly betrayed a Tuscan influence. The picture was absolutely untouched and unfaded, and we got a few moments’ vivid light upon the canvas through a western window. Then, suddenly, that brilliant ray was quenched, and all the church fell into twilight ; and we felt our way out through a side door, to find the sea turned colorless and the sky menacing, and our artist rapidly packing up his paraphernalia and emphatically counseling speed. We got back to our Wienerschnitzel without a wetting ; but we were all awakened at midnight, in our rooms above the linen-draper’s, by what seemed to be a platoon fire of musketry directed against our dwelling. It proved to be only the sudden and simultaneous banging of all the heavy wooden shutters in our neighborhood, followed by a banshee howl of the wind in every narrow alley. But when, at the cheerful hour of five the next morning, we were joined upon the wharf by our artist, who is an experienced sailor, there was a dark look in his weather eye, of which we understood the import only too well, and I must beg to be excused from dwelling at length on the incidents of our return voyage to Fiume.

IV.

IN ISTRIA.

Whoever wants to get an impressive idea of a great nation’s naval resources should go neither to Toulon on the Mediterranean, nor to Portsmouth on the Channel, — nor even to Portsmouth in New Hampshire, — but to a certain deep, extensively ramifying and exquisitely bordered haven, near the southwestern extremity of the Istrian peninsula, sometimes called the Port of Roses, but oftener, of late, by the more formidable name of the Sevastopol of the Adriatic.

Thirty forts, on this side and on that, adorn the hills and islands, and are reflected on a fair summer morning, like that when we saw them first, in the blue waters of the harbor of Pola. They adorn, although their purpose is quite other than ornamental. Their reflections in the still water “ look tranquillity,” at the same time that they suggest reflections that are by no means tranquilizing. Every green island has its tutelary saint as well as its defensive structures ; and St. Peter mounts guard here, and St. Andrew there, and St. Catherine yonder. On the largest of all the islands, the beautiful Scoglio Olivi, the emblem of ancient peace diffuses its silver sheen over the most appalling magazines of modern war. Beyond this point, the bay divides into the military and the commercial haven. Gaudy fishing and trading boats occupy the latter, forests of masts and colonnades of red smoke-stacks the former. There are docks and shipyards, alive with infinite building; and supply and training vessels are anchored, like lesser islands, all about. We look, and admire, and shudder, and wonder no more that Austria should have swallowed at a single gulp the first gallant navy of united Italy, nor at the despairing tenacity with which Italy, with her long seacoast, now clings to the Triple Alliance.

Later, as our boat nears the shore, all thoughts of the present are, for the time, swept away by a sudden surge of associations with an almost interminable past. Six hundred years ago, Pola already appealed to the brooding imagination of Dante Alighieri as a vast conventicle of the dead, a representative place of tombs, like only one other of which the poet knew : “ As at Arles, where the Rhone is like a lake ; as at Pola, hard by the Quarnero, which closes the gate and bathes the last boundary of Italy, the whole region undulates with graves.” ²

Tradition says that Pola was one of the towns founded by the Colchican searchparty sent out after the Argonaut Jason ! We know, at least, that the Romans were here in 175 B. C.; that the place adhered to Pompey and was destroyed by Julius Cæsar, but was afterward rebuilt by Augustus at his daughter’s request, and for her named Julia’s Piety (Pietas Juliæ), Pola. Doges of Genoa and Venice were disputing possession of the place in Dante’s day. It finally fell, some fifty years after his death, to a Genevese Doria, who thus founded the great family of Doria d’Istria.

Halfway up a green hillside on the left of the town springs the outer wall of the great Roman amphitheatre, perfectly intact. It was built about the year 200, by the citizens of Pola, in fulfillment of we know not what vow (voti sui compotes). It accommodated from twenty to twenty-five thousand spectators, and was dedicated to Septimius Severus and Caracalla. I know most of the great Roman remains of Europe, though not, I am sorry to say, those African ones which are attracting so much attention just now. I have seen all the principal theatres, arches, baths, and temples of Italy and the Provincia, as well as the grass-grown camps and arenas of the “ northern island, sundered once from all the human race.” I know Augustus’s bridge at Rimini and the Pontdu-Gard at Nîmes ; Turbia and the Tour Magne and the old lighthouse at Ravenna ; the Porta Nigra and the Basilica at Trèves ; Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli and Diocletian’s palace at Spalato. But by far the most symmetrical and satisfying monument of the great pagan past that I ever beheld is this same airy oval of the amphitheatre of Pola. Its outline is broken only by four projecting towers, two on either side, flanking the shorter axis of the ellipse. There must have once been stairways in these towers, giving access to the higher ranges of seats, which were of beautiful Istrian marble ; and, most curious feature of all, there were windows in the towers, that are still filled with an open stone latticework, similar to what one sees in so many Mohammedan dwelling - houses, and evidently of the same age as the main building. The public square of modern Pola was also the forum of Julia’s town ; or rather a part of it, for surely there must have been a clear space left originally about the twin temples whose elegant Corinthian porticoes now look disdainfully out of the dimness of a narrow street leading from one angle of the Piazza. The more beautiful of these temples, nearly perfect still, was dedicated in the eighth year of our era to Augustus and Rome. The other, for uncertain reasons, is commonly called by the name of the “ great goddess Diana.” The street that leads southward from the forum is spanned by a majestic Roman arch ; erected, so the inscription reads, by a woman, one Sabina Postuma, to celebrate the return of her husband, Sergius Lepidus, from a victorious campaign. Another arch, ruder, and plainly much older than the Sergian, is built into the town wall, and has an almost effaced figure above the gateway, bearing something which a very lively fancy might identify as a club, whence the name Porta Herculea. So much for Roman Pola.

An alluring vision of green foliage on the brow of a hill behind the town induces us to clamber slowly upward, clinging to the shady sides of the already burning streets. On the summit we find a public garden and pleasure-ground, and we sit down under a palm-tree, on the marble steps of a pompous new monument, whence the eye can take in at a glance the classic town and the modern town, and the everlasting beauty of the haven ; the avanzi of that old empire that was for so many ages invincible, and the tremendous preparations which fling their secure defiance at the bold aggressor of to-day. Even the glaring stone structure at whose base we recline repeats the challenge of the thirty forts; for it commemorates Admiral Tegetthoff, who defeated Persano and almost annihilated the young Italian navy in July, 1866. We have no tears prepared to shed for the Austrian commander. Our thoughts, instead, stray sorrowfully back to a certain still and solitary campo santo, on an outlying point of the little island of Lissa, far down the Adriatic, where those of the Italian dead whose bodies were recovered, after that fierce midsummer day, are lying under the cross.

The boat by which we came to Pola steams out of the harbor while we sit upon the hill, waiting idly for the afternoon train that will take us to Trieste. It is a very slow train, for the railway is built along the high crest of the Istrian promontory, and it commands a series of exceedingly lovely views. One takes in at a glance, in passing, the accuracy of Dante’s expression termini, the ends of Italy ; for the whole peninsula is like a severed fragment of that sweet Ombrian country on the other side of the narrow water, whose charm at this season we know so well, — its oak forests and cherry orchards, its inland mountain peaks and clear horizon of gleaming sea. The view is often interrupted upon the highest levels by dense hedges and other barriers raised along the track to protect it from the winter violence of the terrible bora (Boreas), which has even been known, they say, to blow a train off the rails. To-day, on the contrary, the air is so still that the universal buzz of insects and sweep of the mower’s scythe through the luxuriant grass are quite audible inside our carriage ; and in the glassy surface of the beauteous harbor of Trieste, of which we get a matchless view from the ridge of the encircling hills before plunging into the town, every brilliant sail in the multitudinous fleet of anchored craft, red, orange, peacockblue, or dazzling white, “ floats double, sail and shadow.”

Harriet Waters Preston.