swarm over the country, and every hour
brings the travelling carriage of some general
officer thundering in from Vienna; or a white-
coated regiment, travel-stained and way-sore,
piping and taboring down the broken
streets of the Wallachian capital. Wallachia
is beginning to look almost as Austrian as poor
Hungary. There are Austrian hotels, Austrian
soldiers, Austrian carriages, everywhere.

There is no getting away from Bucharest
without a great many formalities; a passport
must be issued, signed and countersigned. I
am obliged to spend the whole day about it.
Towards three o'clock in the afternoon I find
myself at the Austrian police-office; it is
filled with a rabble rout of Jew pedlars,
Wallachian gents setting out to study at
Paris, sly sharp-nosed men who seem always
prowling about these countries (probably for
no good) an Armenian banker or two, and a
few professional Greek gaming-table cheats,
who have been just ordered out of the
country, and are going to try and sneak
across the frontier with their gains and news
to Russia. The officiating chief functionary
is an Austrian sergeant of infantry; he has
the slight disadvantage of not being able to
read; he cannot also conceive it possible that
a gentleman should come about his own passport,
when he might send his servant. The
attraction which even an Austrian police-office
may possess for a student of manners
never enters into his head; he therefore
leaves me for half-an-hour perfectly unnoticed,
and at last turns to me with an abrupt
grunt, and holds out his hand. I take off my
hat with all the respect due to an imperial
royal apostolic sergeant of infantry, and give
him my passport ready opened. I am aware
that an imperial royal apostolic sergeant of
infantry is a person to be conciliated; I
address him, therefore, with proper reverence.
He asks who and what I am, as if he were
discharging an imperial royal apostolic blunderbuss
at my head; I venture to refer him
to my passport; he is holding it, however,
upside down, and repeats his interrogatory in
a voice of thunder. I am taken aback at
these proceedings, and before I can reply he
has doubled up the passport, and thrust it
into my hand; he will have nothing more to
do with me; I run a narrow risk of being
bundled neck and crop out of the office. Fortunately,
I am accompanied by one of the gentlemen
employed at her Majesty's consulate;
he whispers something into the ear of the imperial
royal apostolic sergeant of infantry.
In a moment his whole bearing and demeanour
is altered. I am Herr Graff, Herr
Graden. Will I walk into the next room,
and wait till my passport is prepared? The
next room is more comfortable; it has a fire,
and the Herr Kauzlei, director (an imperial
royal apostolic superannuated captain of
course), will be glad to see me. Oh, dear me!
how I did blush for Austria, and seem to
walk on hot coals, as I slunk shrinking into
the next room. A mere honest, inoffensive
nobody, who desires to travel—maybe on
some useful errand—is stopped for the
veriest trifle, or in any case subjected to the
caprice of a hound; a gentleman, forsooth,
has only to twirl his moustaches, and my
poor friends have been taught to bow down
before him. Woe is me! it is a mighty fine
thing to look at the drama of life in Austria
from a private box; but it is a most fearful
and shocking position to be in the pit or the
galleries.

A heavy snow-storm is falling; I cannot
see across the way, and the fur-clad coachman
and brisk little horses of my carriage look
cloudy and indistinct, as I wrap myself in an
immense black bearskin cloak (price twenty-five
ducats), and prepare to scud about on
my parting errands.

They are concluded at last. I have been
summoned in haste to England; there is no
public carriage for several days, so I have
been obliged to buy one; it has cost fifty
pounds; I am fortunate in a lucky chance
which enables me to get it at the price. I have
been obliged to buy a large sheepskin coat for
my servant, who would otherwise run a fair
chance of being frozen to death during the
journey. I am obliged to lay in a small stock
of provisions, as I shall be able to get nothing
to eat on the road, and I may be snowed up.
Lastly, I have to pay my hotel-bill. My
rooms—two small rooms on the entresol or
semi-first-floor—are charged about six shillings
a-day. The little carriage and pair which
I have used for the last month (walking and
visiting, or going out at night, being
absolutely impossible) has cost fifty golden ducats,
which, with a gratuity to the coachman,
makes about twenty-six pounds English
money. I am consoled: an Austrian general
officer of my acquaintance pays sixty ducats,
or thirty pounds, a month; the hire of these
little carriages having just doubled since the
outbreak of the war. The few travelling
necessaries which I shall have to buy will
also cost enormous prices, as the navigation
of the Danube is stopped, and every manufactured
thing has to come overland from
Paris or Vienna. The Wallachians manufacture
nothing. Posting, I am told, is cheap;
but I shall require fourteen horses, ten for
my own carriage, a Viennese chariot, and
four for my courier. My posting expenses,
therefore, will cost thirteen ducats, or say six
pounds ten, between Bucharest and Kraiova, a
journey of twenty-four hours; and this despite
a government order for horses, which will
diminish the ordinary expense considerably.

These little details will enable the reader
to form some estimate of the expense of
travelling in these countries, and may make
him bless the invention of railways and
steamboats. It is proper to add, however,
that I travelled in great haste, and on a
sudden emergency. If I had been able to
wait a few days, I might have made my