Some of the questions that are asked concerning Bucarest, even by persons who believe themselves well-informed, are highly amusing.  One friend, who is really a well-read man, asked us shortly after our visit whether it was not a great continuous ‘Mabille,’ and he looked very incredulous when we told him that, although we had walked through and through it, and had carefully looked at all the posters announcing amusements in various places, we had no recollection of seeing a dancing-garden amongst them, and that we believed none existed.  Another friend, a highly educated professional man, was not quite sure whether Bucarest was north or south of the Danube; but it was a place, he knew, where the chief occupation was gambling.  There may be some little truth in the latter statement, but gaming-tables are forbidden, and he need not go so far from home as that to see the law evaded.

But it is no wonder that strangers are puzzled to form a correct conception of Bucarest, and their perplexity is not likely to be relieved if they read the descriptions that have been given of the city and its inhabitants from time to time.  Some writers have described it as an assemblage of dilapidated houses standing in unpaved streets.  Its upper classes are represented as very polite depraved ladies and gentlemen, including a large proportion of the former who have been divorced three or four times, and are in the habit of entertaining simultaneously all their ci-devant husbands in the presence and with the sanction of the ‘man in possession.’  The lower classes comprise half-naked gipsies of both sexes, with a considerable sprinkling of priests or ‘popes,’ eating bread and onions or mamaliga (the maize pudding of the masses), or lounging on the doorsteps of the houses, or sauntering along the unpaved streets in charge of a lean pig.  According to such writers the chief occupation of the Bucarester is getting divorced or being buried in state.  Then there is the romantic school of authors who represent it as a city of palaces standing in their own grounds, with numerous beautiful Byzantine churches, pleasure-gardens in which plays are performed, or where the Laoutari or minstrels (gipsy bands) play wild and stirring music all day long.  There are charming Roumanian belles, with flashing eyes and the sweetest of voices; dark-eyed gipsies, chaste as Diana and as fleet of foot; grave boyards, stately Turks (of whom, by the way, we never saw one whilst we were on Roumanian ground, although there were plenty, very much married indeed, on the Danube steamers); reverend abbots, with long black robes and flowing white beards; and nuns in unique costumes of dark cloth, with caps and hoods resembling a crusader’s helmet.  The truth, as usual, lies between these two opposite extremes.

[Illustration:  MONK AND NUN.]