larger houses really stand in gardens of
considerable extent. This, too, is the cause of the city covering so
large a space in proportion to the number of its inhabitants. It is
built with perplexing irregularity, as will be seen even from our
superficial plan, where only the main streets are given; but the
intermediate spaces are filled with narrow, crooked, and ill-paved
streets and lanes, their most disagreeable feature being that, in
consequence of the soft yielding nature of the subsoil, the pavement
gives way, and soon becomes inconveniently undulating. There are,
however, several broad well-paved streets,[28] the chief being the Podu
Mogosoi, as it is still called, although after the fall of Plevna it
received the more dignified appellation of the Strada Victoriei; it runs
through the centre of the city from an incipient boulevard--which
promises one of these days to metamorphose the whole place--to a park or
garden of considerable extent, where it is further continued through an
alley of trees known as the Chaussee. This is the favourite drive of
the Bucaresters, and at stated hours a rapid succession of vehicles
pours out from various parts of the city to see and to be seen. These
birjas, as the little open carriages (resembling a small _caleche_) are
called, contain the moat motley assemblage of sight-seers--ambassadors,
state officials, and well-to-do citizens of both sexes in European
dress; ladies of more humble rank in the national costume;[29] gipsies
and poor workmen and women, who, one might imagine, would be better on
foot, half-clad, and very considerably unwashed. In or about the Strada
Victoriei are many of the principal buildings--the national theatre, the
King's palace (a very modest structure at present undergoing
improvements), the Ministry of Finance, and some fine hotels. The shops,
which are mostly kept by Germans and French-men, are of a fair kind,
though not equal to those of Vienna, Paris, or indeed of many smaller
continental capitals.[30] The houses here, and everywhere in Bucarest,
are built of brick, plastered white, and often very tastefully decorated
externally with figures or foliage in terra cotta; but it is the
cracking and falling off of this external coating, which occurs more
readily in a place subject to great changes of temperature than in more
equable temperate climes, that imparts to Bucarest the dilapidated
appearance so often referred to by writers. This blemish is, howeve