very old, very prosperous,
rich in herds of horses, sheep and magnificent Hungarian oxen, large,
white and with almost straight, spreading horns, like the oxen of the
ancient Greeks. There we met a man of the old school, nearly eighty, who
had never in his life slept under cover, his duty being to guard his
flocks and herds by night as well as day, though he had amassed what was
for his station in life, a great fortune. He had never been seen in
anything but the national costume, the same as worn in his part of the
world for several hundred years. And so we went to see him in his home.
We were all expectation! You can imagine our disappointment, when, upon
arrival, we found our host awaiting us, painfully attired in the
ordinary dark cloth coat and trousers of the modern farmer the world
over. He had donned the ugly things in our honour, taking an hour to
make his toilet, as we were secretly informed by one of the household.
We tell this to show how one must persevere in the pursuit of artistic
data. This was the same occasion cited in _The Art of Interior
Decoration,_ when the highly decorative peasant tableware was banished
by the women in the house, to make room, again in our honour, for plain
white ironstone china.

The feeling for line accredited to the French woman is equally the
birthright of the Magyar--woman and man. One sees it in the dash of the
court beauty who can carry off a mass of jewels, barbaric in splendour,
where the average European or American would feel a Christmas tree in
the same. And no man in Europe wears his uniform as the Hungarian
officer of hussars does; the astrachan-trimmed short coat, slung over
one shoulder, cap trimmed with fur, on the side of his head, and
skin-tight trousers inside of faultless, spurred boots reaching to the
knees. One can go so far as to say there is something decorative in the
very temperament of Hungarian women, a fiery abandon, which makes _line_
in a subtle way quite apart from the line of costume. This quality is
also possessed by the Spanish woman, and developed to a remarkable
degree in the professional Spanish dancer. The Gipsy woman has it
too,--she brought it with her from Asia, as the Magyar's forebears did.

Speaking of the Magyar, nothing so perfectly expresses the national
temperament as the czardas--that peasant dance which begins with calm,
stately repression, and ends in a mad ecstasy of expression, the rapid
crescendo, the whirl, ending when the