prevail.  Before their kingdom was dismembered the Poles were the best customers for Tokay wine, but they are too poor now to have such luxuries; added to this, Russia has for nearly a century past laid an almost prohibitive duty on Hungarian wine.  The fiscal impositions of Austria have also weighed heavily on Hungary’s productions.  At present North Germany and Scandinavia are amongst the most ready purchasers of Tokay; and England is beginning to appreciate the “Szamarodni” or “dry Tokay,” remarkable for the absence of all deleterious sweetness.

In good years the vintage of Tokay may be estimated at something like 150,000 eimers, an eimer being about two and a half gallons; but a really good year is the exception, not the rule.  For three years (since 1874) the vintages have all been below the average.  The season of 1876 was a complete failure; a disastrous frost on the 19th of May in that year completely destroyed the hopes and prospects of the vine-grower.  Indeed he has a trying life of it, for his hopes go up and down with the barometer.  If his vines escape the much-dreaded May frosts, there is a risk that the summer may be too wet for the grapes, which love sunshine.  Then, again, in the hottest summers there are violent hail-storms, and in half an hour he may see his promising crop beaten to the ground.  It has been well remarked that “the weather seems to have no control over itself in Hungary.”

The vine-grower’s troubles do not end when the vintage is successfully over.  Tokay is a troublesome wine in respect to fermentation; it requires three years before it can travel, and even when these critical years are over, the wine will sometimes get “sick” in the spring—­at the identical time when the sap rises in the living plant.

The unique quality of the Tokay is due to the soil, and perhaps to some other conditions; but not to the peculiarity of the grape, for, as a matter of fact, they grow a variety of sorts.  The cultivation of the vine appears to be of great antiquity in this part of the world.  The introduction of the plant is attributed to the inevitable Phoenician; but, treading on more assured historic ground, we find that King Bela IV., in the thirteenth century, caused new kinds of grapes to be imported from Italy, and brought about an improvement generally in the culture of the vine.

But to return to the question of the soil.  The Tokay Eperies group of hills is one of several well-defined groups of volcanic rocks that exist in Hungary and Transylvania.  In the Tokay district the formations are partly eruptive, partly sedimentary, but nowhere older than the Tertiary period, say the geologists.  The Hegyalia (which means “mountain-slopes” in the Magyar tongue) forms the southern spur of the extended volcanic region, composed of trachyte and rhyolithe, beginning at Eperies and terminating in the conical hill of Tokay, which protrudes itself so singularly into the Alfoeld, or plain.