plain, and many other local circumstances, it is, I suppose, a very favourable example of a German settlement in Transylvania.  I had been struck by the extreme neatness of the dwellings and the generally well-to-do air of the people, but there is nothing progressive about these Saxons.  I saw plainly that what their fathers did before them they do themselves, and expect their sons to follow in the same groove.  There is amongst them generally a dead level of content incomprehensible to a restless Englishman.

When I asked why they did not try to turn this or that natural advantage to account, I was met with the reply, “Our fathers have done very well without it, why should not we?” I could never discover any inclination amongst the Saxons to initiate any fresh commercial enterprise either at home or abroad, nor would they respond with any interest to the most tempting suggestions as to ways and means of increasing their possessions.  It is all very well to draw the moral picture of a contented people.  Contentment under some circumstances is the first stage of rottenness.  The inevitable law of change works the deterioration of a race which does not progress.  This fact admits of practical proof here.  For instance, the cloth manufactures of Transylvania are falling into decay, and there is nothing else of an industrial kind substituted.  The result is a decrease of the general prosperity, and a marked diminution in the population of the towns.  Nor is this the case in populous places only.  The Saxon villager desires to transmit the small estate he derived from his father intact to his only son.  He does not desire a large family; it would tax his energies too much to provide for that.  It is deeply to be lamented that a superior race like the educated Saxons of Transylvania, who held their own so bravely against Turk and Tartar, and, what was more difficult still, preserved their religious liberty in spite of Austrian Jesuits, should now be losing their political ascendancy, owing mainly to their displacement by the Wallacks.  According to the last census, the German immigrants in Hungary are estimated at 1,820,922.  I have no means of making an accurate comparison, but I hear on all hands that the numbers are diminished.  There are, besides, proofs of it in the case of villages which were exclusively Saxon having now become partly, even wholly, Wallachian.

There are wonderfully few chateaux in this picturesque land.  In my frequent rides over the Burzenland I rarely saw any dwellings above what we should attribute to a yeoman farmer.  As a matter of fact there are fewer aristocrats in this part of Hungary, or perhaps I should say this part of Transylvania, than in any other.

After my pleasant morning’s ride I found myself at Kronstadt, and put up at Hotel “No. 1”—­an odd name for a fairly good inn.  There is another farther in town—­the Hotel Bucharest—­also a place of some pretension.  The charges for rooms generally in the country are out of all proportion to the accommodation given.  Travellers are rare, at least they used to be before the present war; but Kronstadt is the terminus of the direct railway from Buda-Pest, which, communicating with the Tomoescher Pass over the Carpathians, is the shortest route to Bucharest.