have accepted their fate meekly, but there is no meekness in the Hungarian character. They bitterly resent the partition of their country and, if I read them aright, they will seize the first opportunity that presents itself to regain the territories that have been taken from them. That grave injustices were done them by the treaty of peace there can be no denying, and, until those injustices have been rectified, Hungary will remain a source of anxiety and danger to her neighbors.

From Budapest our road led southeasterly, across the great Hungarian plain, into Transylvania, which is now a part of Rumania. It was still early in April, it had been raining steadily for days, and the whole country-side, which is as flat as the top of a table, was a sea of yellow mud, through which at times the car could hardly force its way. Our difficulties were increased, moreover, by our ignorance of the Magyar language. Imagine trying to inquire one's way in a country where one is constantly encountering such names as Ujszász, Püspökladány, Hódmezö-Vásárhely, Bánffyhunyad, Székelykocsárd, Sepsiszentgyorgy! By the time we reached the Carpathians my vocal cords were almost paralyzed.

The annoyances and delays which we had been led to expect in Hungary materialized as soon as we crossed the Rumanian border, for the Government lives in constant fear of a Hungarian uprising in its newly acquired provinces. As a result, Transylvania is flooded with spies, secret police, gen

darmes, and soldiery.

is

Every stranger

under suspicion. The passport regulations are tedious and exasperating. The secret societies which are believed to exist among the Hungarian population have driven the authorities into a state of nervousness bordering on hysteria. Every traveler is regarded as a spy until he can prove his innocence. When two or more persons are seen talking together, the police promptly jump to the conclusion that they are conspirators engaged in hatching a plot against the Government. While we were breakfasting in the coffee-room of the hotel at Klausenburg, the ancient capital of Transylvania, a young Hungarian, a reporter on a local paper, came in to interview us on our trip. It was a perfectly innocent interview, in which politics were not even mentioned. Yet before the reporter had been gone ten minutes I was approached by an agent of the secret police. He informed us, politely enough, that, as we had been seen in conversation with a Hungarian, we were under suspicion, and that the chief of police wished to interrogate us. us. It took the better part of an hour, the production of letters to half the members of the Rumanian cabinet, the diplomatic visé on my passport, and the sight of a Rumanian order, which I happen to possess, to convince that functionary that we had no designs against the Government.

That same afternoon we stopped in Segesvár for petrol. The curious crowd which always collected about the car at sight of the American flag

was joined shortly by a young Rumanian who began to question us in our own tongue.

we ascended the northern slopes of the Carpathians through some of the finest scenery in Europe, the green-clad,

"In Martin's Ferry, Ohio," was the answer. "I worked there six years, and I wish to God I was back there again."

"What are you doing here, then?" I inquired, by way of making conversation.

ried grandeur against a hot blue sky. Reaching the summit at Predeal, on the old frontier, we went roaring down into Wallachia, through Sinaia, which is the Bretton Woods of Rumania; past the royal château of Pelesch, where I had visited the king and queen two years before; through Ploesti,

"And what do you detect?"

"Just now," he explained confidentially, "I'm detecting you. When the chief of police heard that there was a car with an American flag in town, he sent me down to detect what you are doing here."

We spent the night in Kronstadt, or Brassó, to give it its Rumanian name, one of the chain of frontier fortress-towns founded in the thirteenth century by the Teutonic Order, which, like the Templars and Hospitalers, began as a charitable society, developed into a military club, and ended as something akin to a chartered company exercising rights of sovereignty on the troubled confines of Christendom. The next morning

wells; and so down the straight and dusty road which leads to Bukharest.

We reached the Rumanian capital toward the end of the week before Easter, thus enabling us to witness the picturesque and colorful ceremonies with which the Rumanians, who belong to the Greek Church, celebrate the end of the Lenten season. The most interesting of these begins on Easter eve in the venerable Metropolitan Church, being attended by the king and the members of the royal family. Ladew and I left our hotel at eleven in the evening and walked to the church through streets lined by soldiery. The Metropolitan Church, in which the kings of Rumania are crowned, was built in 1656, and stands within the walls of a monastery on a

hill which overlooks the city. The streets leading to it were already crowded with carriages and motorcars bearing cabinet ministers, generals, members of the diplomatic corps, and other dignitaries, all in evening dress or in uniform, their breasts blazing with decorations. At a quarter to twelve we heard the shrilling of police whistles along the route, and a moment later the royal procession came in sight, headed by the minister of the household, gorgeous in sky blue, riding in a court carriage. Then came a squadron of lifeguards mounted on great black horses, the men very smart and soldierly in their long gray cloaks and silver helmets; an equerry in scarlet and gold; outriders in the royal livery; and finally a great coach of gilt and glass, drawn by four horses ridden by postilions, and with three footmen in plumed hats and powdered wigs and white satin knee-breeches clinging on behind. Within the coach, which rocked and swayed as it jolted over the cobbles, sat King Ferdinand in the uniform of a field-marshal, and beside him, very fair and lovely in her white gown and veil, his daughter Marie, now the Queen of Jugoslavia.

There was a brief wait after the royal party entered the church, then,

just as the hands of my watch pointed to midnight, a salvo of rockets went streaking skyward, announcing to all Bukharest that Easter had come. Thereupon the bells of all the churches in the city began to boom until the air reverberated with their brazen clangor, and the waiting throngs lighted the candles that they carried, so that quite suddenly the crowded hillsides below the church were dotted with thousands of jets of flame, like a city when the electric lights are turned on at nightfall. About one o'clock a battalion of infantry came swinging down the hill, the bugles playing a stirring march, and every soldier carrying a lighted taper, which threw into relief the bronzed faces beneath the trenchhelmets. But it was nearly two o'clock before the royal coach, with its escort of clattering cavalry, came rumbling down the lane formed by thousands and thousands of people, who held lighted candles in their hands and chanted: "He is risen! He is risen! He is risen!"

We had planned to leave Bukharest on Monday morning, but, to our dismay, we found that the Easter holiday would not end until the following Thursday, which meant a delay of three days in obtaining the necessary

visés on our passports.

ern Europe in these days life is just one damn visé after another. And it also meant that we would miss the steamer which we had planned to take from Constantinople to Syria. But when Peter Jay, who is the American minister to Rumania, learned of our predicament, he asked his Bulgarian and Greek colleagues as a personal favor to visé our passports despite the fact that their legations were officially closed. So, to use Ladew's favorite expression, everything was under perfect control.

We left Bukharest on the morning of Easter Monday, expecting to cross the Danube that afternoon; but, when still thirty miles from the river, something went wrong with the oiling system of the car. So, leaving John with his feet protruding from beneath the car, Ladew and I started down the road toward the next village, Calugareni by name. It was a holiday, and the villagers, dressed in their picturesque gala costumes, -the men in sleeveless jackets and tight white breeches ornamented with arabesques of black braid, and high caps of white sheepskin; the women in embroidered blouses and skirts of green or scarlet,were gathered on the green before the village inn,

where a few of the younger men were dancing to music provided by a Gipsy orchestra.

Strangers were evidently a novelty in Calugareni, and the furor created by our arrival threatened to break up

among the dancers with their wine-laden trays, the circle steadily grew larger, the tempo of the music faster, the dancers more spirited, until finally they attained a pitch of vivacity which would have satisfied even the director of a Broadway musical show.

Then, just when everything was going beautifully, trouble materialized in the form of a grim old man in a sheepskin cap who suddenly burst upon the scene and began belaboring the dancers with his cudgel, accompanying his blows with a stream of reproaches and invective. The old man, so the innkeeper explained, was one of the village elders-a "selectman" he would be called in New Englandand he was incensed because the village youths were dancing instead of

digging a grave for a horse that had died that morning. Naturally, we could n't permit our party to be broken up just as it was getting started, so Ladew, assuming his most winning manner, attempted to placate the irate elder with a bottle of cognac. At first he sullenly refused to accept our proffered hospitality, but the villagers, with whom he was obviously no favorite, quickly jeered him into it. His second glass left him in a perceptibly mellower frame of mind, after his fourth he had entirely forgotten about the dead horse, and after his sixth he insisted on himself leading the dancing, introducing steps and cutting capers that left us weak and helpless from laughter.

By this time the whole village was dancing, young folk and old, men, women, and children. There must have been fully three hundred people in the circle, and the array of empty bottles was growing larger and larger. But John had arrived with the car, and the road called us, so I asked for the bill. It included some eighty bottles of wine and reached the total of two thousand lei, or just under fourteen dollars. When we took our departure, the villagers gave us a farewell that King Ferdinand would have envied, waving their hats and pelting us with flowers. It will be some time, I imagine, before Calugareni forgets the two strangers who came strolling out of nowhere, played hosts to the entire village throughout an afternoon, and then climbed into a big gray car and disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.

We spent that night at Giurgiul, on the Danube, and the next morning, amid much excitement, loaded the car on a barge and were towed across the

river to Rustchuk, on the Bulgarian shore. The run across Bulgaria, from the Danube to the Balkans, was the pleasantest of our entire journey, for the roads were dry without being dusty, the sky looked like an inverted bowl of blue porcelain, and the air was heavy with the fragrance of blossoms. For the first time we felt that spring had really come. Bulgaria, particularly that portion of the country lying on the northern slopes of the Balkans, is a land of orchard-covered hillsides and fertile, highly cultivated valleys; of quaint villages with red-roofed, white-walled cottages; of pleasant woods, and sweeping, upland pastures on which graze flocks of sheep and herds of curious, curly-coated swine. We lunched in Tirnovo, the ancient capital of Bulgaria, on the balcony of a little restaurant built on the edge of a cliff rising sheer above the brawling Yantra, and nightfall found us in Gabrova, a busy manufacturing village, with many woolen mills, at the foot of the Shipka Pass.

The Shipka, celebrated as the scene of fierce fighting in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, forms one of the principal gateways between northern Bulgaria and the former Turkish province of Eastern Rumelia. The road does not pass between high peaks, but crosses the main range of the Balkans at its highest point, about 7500 feet, so that it is therefore not a pass in the ordinary sense of the word. I might mention, by the way, that "Balkan" is not a distinctive term, as most people suppose, but is applied by the Bulgarians, as well as the Turks, to all mountains.

I thought that I had become inured to bad roads when I motored to Alaska, but the worst of them were