ic school of
authors who represent it as a city of palaces standing in their own
grounds, with numerous beautiful Byzantine churches, pleasure-gardens in
which plays are performed, or where the Laoutari or minstrels (gipsy
bands) play wild and stirring music all day long. There are charming
Roumanian belles, with flashing eyes and the sweetest of voices;
dark-eyed gipsies, chaste as Diana and as fleet of foot; grave boyards,
stately Turks (of whom, by the way, we never saw one whilst we were on
Roumanian ground, although there were plenty, very much married indeed,
on the Danube steamers); reverend abbots, with long black robes and
flowing white beards; and nuns in unique costumes of dark cloth, with
caps and hoods resembling a crusader's helmet. The truth, as usual, lies
between these two opposite extremes.

[Illustration: MONK AND NUN.]

Bucarest, or Bucuresci, 'the city of joy,' as it is called by the
Roumanians, is a large, irregular, straggling city of about 175,000
inhabitants, situated on a dirty little stream called the Dambovitza (as
already stated, a tributary of the Ardges), concerning which some very
famous verses have been written, proclaiming its waters to be so sweet
that any one who drinks of them never desires to leave Bucarest. What
its retentive properties may have been in former times we are not able
to say, but we can quite imagine any person who ventures to drink of
the water being incapable of leaving the city for ever afterwards.
However, the prosaic authorities are not greatly impressed by their
national poetry in this instance. The river is being 'canalised,' or
confined within stone embankments, and there is a plentiful supply of
_apa dulce_ from another source, which exercises no controlling
influence whatever upon the movements of the drinker. The greatest
length of the city as the crow flies is about 3-1/10 miles, and its
greatest breadth somewhat less, but many of the outlying parts resemble
country roads rather than streets. Viewed from a distance, or from the
hill upon which the metropolitan church stands, it has a most
picturesque appearance, consisting of a vast number of churches, chiefly
Byzantine, only a few of which are visible in our photograph, and many
good-sized buildings. But what gives a peculiar charm to the city is
that all these buildings appear to be placed in one vast garden, for
there is hardly a single one without some trees in its immediate
vicinity, and many of the