to the magnate’s family procured possession of his body, and secretly conveyed it to the church in the Serviten Gasse, where they built up the coffin in the wall, and carefully preserved it for years.  When the reconciliation with Austria took place, concealment being no longer necessary, they revealed their secret.  The coffin was then opened, and it was found that the features of the unfortunate Batthyanyi had been singularly well preserved.  Several who had fought for freedom by his side in 1848 looked once more on the face of their leader.  The subsequent funeral in the new cemetery was made the occasion of a very marked display of patriotic feeling.  Later an imposing monument was erected, but Count Batthyanyi’s best and most enduring monument is the part he took in the emancipation of the serfs.

Turning aside from the public demonstrations around the tombs of poets and patriots, we wandered down the more secluded alleys of the cemetery.  In a lonely spot, quite away from the crowd and the glare, we came upon an exquisite little plot of garden with growing flowers, shrubs, and cypress-trees, tended, one could see, with loving care, “and in the garden there is a sepulchre.”  I shall not easily forget the look of ineffable grief visible on the face of an elderly man who was arranging and rearranging the lights round and about the family grave.  We noticed that the names on the slab were those of a wife and mother, followed by her children, several of them, sons and daughters, the dates of their decease being terribly close one upon another.  I had a conviction that the lonely man we saw there was the only survivor of his family; I feel sure it must have been so.  It was very touching the way in which he (aimlessly, it seemed to me) moved first this light and then the other, or grouped them together around the vases of sweet flowers that decked the graves.  It was all that remained for him to do for his beloved ones; and we could see the poor man was vainly occupying himself, lingering on, unwilling to leave the spot!

We had not much fancy for returning amongst the patriotic crowd gathered about the gaslighted Valhalla, so we made our way out.

We English must have our say about statistics whenever there is a wedding or a funeral, and as a fact Buda-Pest comes out very badly in its death-rate.  It is only within the last two or three years that they have taken to publish the comparative returns of the capital cities of Europe, and now it appears that Buda-Pest is in the unenviable position of having on an average the highest death-rate of any European town!  By some this is attributed to the great excess of infant mortality—­consolatory for the grown-up people, as reducing their risk; but the children, who die like flies before they are twelve months old, may say with the epitaph in the country churchyard—­

    “If then we so soon were done for,
    What the deuce were we begun for?”

I do not speak as one with authority, but duly-qualified persons tell me that nursery reform is much needed in Hungary.  I know not what it is they do with the children, only it seems the system is wrong somewhere, as the bills of mortality clearly testify.