hey subsisted on
unripe fruits and that unfailing fund of mild tobacco which every male
being in all those countries invariably manages to secure. Walking
abroad in Orsova was no easy task, for one was constantly compelled to
step over these poor fugitives, who packed themselves into the sand at
noonday, and managed for a few hours before the cool evening breezes
came to forget their miseries. The vast fleet of river-steamers
belonging to the Austrian company was laid up at Orsova, and dozens
of captains, conversing in the liquid Slav or the graceful Italian or
guttural German, were for ever seated about the doors of the little
cafes smoking long cigars and quaffing beakers of the potent white
wine produced in Austrian vineyards.

Opposite Orsova lie the Servian Mountains, bold, majestic, inspiring.
Their noble forests and the deep ravines between them are exquisite in
color when the sun flashes along their sides. A few miles below
the point where the Hungarian and Roumanian territories meet
the mountainous region declines into foot-hills, and then to an
uninteresting plain. The Orsovan dell is the culminating point of
all the beauty and grandeur of the Danubian hills. From one eminence
richly laden with vineyards I looked out on a fresh April morning
across a delicious valley filled with pretty farms and white cottages
and ornamented by long rows of shapely poplars. Turning to the right,
I saw Servia's barriers, shutting in from the cold winds the fat
lands of the interior; vast hillsides dotted from point to point with
peaceful villages, in the midst of which white churches with slender
spires arose; and to the left the irregular line of the Roumanian
peaks stood up, jagged and broken, against the horizon. Out from
Orsova runs a rude highway into the rocky and savage back-country. The
celebrated baths of Mehadia, the "hot springs" of the Austro-Hungarian
empire, are yearly frequented by three or four thousand sufferers, who
come from the European capitals to Temesvar, and are thence trundled
in diligences to the water-cure. But the railway is penetrating even
this far-off land, where once brigands delighted to wander, and
Temesvar and Bucharest will be bound together by a daily
"through-service" as regular as that between Pesth and Vienna.

[Illustration: SISTOVA.]

I sat one evening on the balcony of the diminutive inn known as "The
Hungarian Crown," watching the sunbeams on the broad current of the
Danube and li