After sunset we arrived at Dreucova, and next morning went on board the steamer, which conveyed me up the Danube to Semlin.  The lower town of Semlin is, from the exhalations on the banks of the river, frightfully insalubrious, but the cemetery enjoys a high and airy situation.  The people in the town die off with great rapidity; but, to compensate for this, the dead are said to be in a highly satisfactory state of preservation.  The inns here, once so bad, have greatly improved; but mine host, zum Golden Lowen, on my recent visits, always managed to give a very good dinner, including two sorts of savoury game.  I recollect on a former visit, going to another inn, and found in the dining-room an individual, whose ruddy nose, and good-humoured nerveless smile, denoted a fondness for the juice of the grape, and seitel after seitel disappeared with rapidity.  By-the-bye, old father Danube is as well entitled to be represented with a perriwig of grapes as his brother the Rhine.  Hungary in general, has a right merry bacchanalian climate.  Schiller or Symian wine is in the same parallel of latitude as Claret, Oedenburger as Burgundy, and a line run westwards from Tokay would almost touch the vineyards of Champagne.  Csaplovich remarks in his quaint way, that the four principal wines of Hungary are cultivated by the four principal nations in it.  That is to say, the Slavonians cultivate the Schiller, Germans the Oedenburger and Ruster, Magyars and Wallachians the Menesher.  Good Schiller is the best Syrmian wine.  But I must return from this digression to the guest of the Adler.  On hearing that I was an Englishman, he expressed a wish to hear as much of England as possible, and appeared thunderstruck, when I told him that London had nearly two millions of inhabitants, being four hundred thousand more than the population of the whole of the Banat.  This individual had of course learned five languages with his mother’s milk, and therefore thought that the inhabitants of such a country as England must know ten at least.  When I told him that the majority of the people in England knew nothing but English, he said, somewhat contemptuously, “O! you told me the fair side of the English character:  but you did not tell me that the people was so ignorant.”  He then good-humouredly warned me against practising on his credulity.  I pointed out how unnecessary other languages were for England itself; but that all languages could be learned in London.

“Can Wallachian be learned in London?”

“I have my doubts about Wallachian, but”—­

“Can Magyar be learned in London?”

“I suspect not.”

“Can Servian be learnt in London?”

“I confess, I don’t think that any body in London teaches Servian; but”—­

“There again, you travellers are always making statements unfounded on fact.  I have mentioned three leading languages, and nobody in your city knows anything about them.”

CHAPTER V.