to watch you under their long black lashes, or to rise to kiss your hand as you pass out again.

Near the churches always, and often at special spots along the road, as at the verge of the toloka, where the ground descends almost precipitously and the country lies below like a vast picture outspread at the wayfarer's feet, are these great crucifixes, quite unlike any I had seen elsewhere. A tall slender pole supports a wooden framework like a shallow box set cornerwise upon it, with back and sides, but no front. Within this, and by it protected, is the crucifix, surmounted often by the Dove, sometimes with God the Father over all, and usually with two little angels astride upon the arms of the cross. At the foot stand the Blessed Virgin and another saint, and all the symbols of the Passion-the sponge, the nails,

the

scourge, the crown of thorns -are represented, with a miniature ladder just at the top of the supporting pole; while occasionally, perched upon the apex of the frame, Peter's cock, carved half life-size, flaps his wings against the sky. It is all in wood, painted in brilliant hues, which the sun and air soon mellow, and, like the carvings on the altar-screens, rough, but full of decision, spirit, devotion. In many respects East Galicia responds to one's idea of Arcadia. But do not suppose that there are no shadows on the picture, -that the peasants are always happy and always good. The sun scorches them in summer and the pitiless cold shrivels

them in winter; they drink too much vodki; they go astray by divers paths; but their struggles are with the elemental forces of nature, the elemental passions of the human heart, and are not superinduced by an artificial civilisation. And between Arcadia and East Galicia there is one great, one overwhelming difference-there were no Jews in Arcadia. Here they are everywhere, like a blight upon the fair face of the land, like a consuming canker. One may go to Poland with no prepossession against the Hebrew-with, on the contrary, high principles on the subject of all men being brothers; but I defy any unprejudiced person to live there a week without becoming violently anti-Semitic-without exclaiming with the Frenchman when reminded that the Jews were the Lord's chosen people: "Quel drôle de goût!"

One reads of the Polish Jew in newspapers and in novels-of his greasy kaftan; of his dirty white stockings; of his sidecurls; of his lust of having,— but he transcends all one's expectations. Any one can tell a Jew's house in a moment, partly because it is usually washed blue, and therefore no peasant ever washes his house that colour, but chiefly because it is almost invariably dirty, tumbledown, and degraded. No fruittrees shade it, no flowers bloom at the door, no kreutzer is spent, no labour is devoted to anything that will not yield an instant return in hard cash. The only thing the Jews seem to extravagate in is bedding, and they put outside their doors

see

bratteries of little Aarons and Abrahams, who invariably after two years old, but sometimes earlier, develop the noses and the expressions of their elders, are also airing at the doors. Emphatically it is the case with the Polish Jew that "the days of his youth are the days of his"-beauty, for with the boys it seldom survives babyhood; and although the quite young girls are often pretty-very pretty-they are hardly grown-up before they begin to get coarse and heavy.

No Jew ever works in the fields, he only bargains, and trades, and cheats. No Jew ever walks, he drives with a swarthy bunch of his brethren in a cart drawn by a little horse, with bones protruding through its skin in all directions, whom he beats viciously and starves to within an inch of its life. He gives you a sly, unfriendly glance as he passes, as if he would do you a mischief if he dared, so different from the gleaming smile and hearty "Slavas!" of the countrypeople. He is shrewder than the peasant, and he gets the better of him, cheats him, runs him into debt, and grinds his face at every turn. Occasionally the long-suffering, but at last maddened, flies rise in wrath against the spiders; one or two are beaten and killed, and then the law just within whose letter every Jew knows how

He paused: "You dinna ken what's gone afore," he said, and went on, unmoved. It is indeed difficult for us in this country to realise what has "gone afore" such outbursts of frenzied exasperation.

These usurers compass the ruin not only of the countrypeople, gentle and simple, but of the foolish young officers and soldiers in the garrison towns on every hand, and yet their riches seem to do them no good. The owner of a million florins has his slippers as much down at heel, and his house as devoid of comfort and grace, as if he were not worth a hundred kreutzers.

One of the joys—of the thousand joys of getting up into the mountains is that one seems to leave the Jews behind. They penetrate there too, no doubt, but they are not nearly so much en évidence as in the little towns whose market-squares are one dusky cloud of kaftans. There can be few more delightful experiences in this world than one which began for us at three one June morning, and which took us far up into the blue Carpathians, and brought us home again on a raft, down sixty merry miles of the rushing Czeremosz. The toloka was

sparkling in its early freshness as we crossed it; and Peter's cock flapped his wings from his perch above the crucifix, as if he were making ready to crow when the right moment came. Through the sleepy little town we bumped, pausing only for a moment to embark the pleasant and sympathetic Polish friends who were to share our adventures. We drove in an old black carriage, warranted to stand the roughest roads, and a long cart of the country, both decorated with green boughs, so that one felt half like a wedding and half like a religious procession. At first the road lay through a valley with a river-not yet the Czeremoszfar down below, and skirted with round, tree-clad hills. Oak and birch, still in their freshest summer beauty, mingled everywhere. Gradually, at long intervals, pines began to appear; and as they grew more numerous the oaks grew fewer, and at last vanished altogether from the scene. Then the birches began to yield, foot by foot, until presently there was only one to be seen now and then, like a vivid flash of emerald, against the dusky background. Finally they too disappeared, and the conquering pines took the whole landscape into their keeping.

It was a Greek feast-day, so there were no women to be met, as one sees them on weekdays, stride-legged on little horses, spinning, among great piles of cruses and water-cans, which are made of pine-laths in the mountains and carried down to be sold in the towns. Everybody was in freshest,

whitest, ruddiest Sunday garments, and the bells of the little bronze churches were shaking and tossing in the belfries as they called to mass. We stopped once to bait at a little whitewashed roadside hostelry, and then the road wound on and on, "uphill all the way," while the higher peaks of the mountains began to loom on us from afar. Soon we reached the Czeremosz river, and henceforth our way lay alongside of its current, where great derelict pine-stems were floating majestically down the stream, or lying stranded against the banks.

About noon we halted again, at a country-house nestled in a hollow of the hills. Before it, at a little distance, flowed the river; behind, the ground rose to rocky heights, where agile, long-legged sheep were cropping the short, crisp, sweet grass among the boulders. The house itself, low, whitewashed, and surrounded by a brown wooden verandah, into which the upstairs sitting-rooms opened, was embowered in trees-not bushes, trees of lilac, of all different shades, and just then in fullest flower. From the verandah one could put one's face in the sweet pyramids and gather them in generous posies. The garden, too, was a wilderness of delight. It was full of weeds, and the frames were tumbling to pieces; but there were winding paths shaded by apple-trees, and tall white Narcissus poeticus in plenty, and a riot of lily of the valley; and the rose-trees, which showed evidences of tender care amid their rather casual sur

buds.

A traveller in Spain has recently given an almost incredible account of the inhospitality of the Spaniards.1 Poland is certainly a more encouraging country to explore. Here, on the contrary, it is the hospitality one meets that is wellnigh incredible. We were a party of six, with four horses and two men, and yet it seemed all but a foregone conclusion that we should stay, at least until next day, and our declining to do so a real, heartfelt grievance. It was nothing, our hostess assured us. A few evenings before, her daughter, when walking in the garden, had descried three carriages approaching. They arrived, and debouched eighteen people, of course to stay the night. "And although my cook was away, doing his military service, and I had only a girl to help me, I gave them supper in threequarters of an hour!"

It follows, naturally, the houses not being large, that Polish and British ideas as to the amount of accommodation and privacy required by the individual are a little at variance. On such an occasion as this the ladies double up very tight indeed, while the gentlemen are contented to lie down in rows in the hay-loft or the sitting-rooms. The distinction between sitting-rooms and bedrooms is also not so hard and fast as with us: the rooms communicate by folding-doors, which in the daytime stand constantly open, and although

by a man-servant in regulation canonicals, it need not surprise you to see a wash-stand, or even a bed, in the dining-room.

After we had strolled in the garden and filled our hands with flowers, and before we climbed again into our green - bowered waggons, we were refreshed with a collation — something

But

that is neither breakfast nor lunch, but midway between the two. Such collations were known in our own land in the days of "the incomparable Jane." Elizabeth Bennet partook of one when she visited Darcy at Pemberley, under the wing of Uncle and Aunt Gardiner; Fanny Price, after her long drive from Mansfield Park to the home of Mr Rushworth, was a guest at another. it may be questioned whether either Elizabeth or Fanny had more delicious morsels offered to them than they would have had in Poland. had in Poland. Rose-jam, insinuated between layers of extraordinarily light pastry, has left a fragrant memory behind it; and there is a kind of sheepmilk cheese, slightly acid and of the consistency of thick cream, of which Poland keeps the happy secret.

The stranger who does not know the language of the country has a restful sense of ease and irresponsibility. In Galicia people politely begin by talking French or German for your benefit; but whenever the conversation becomes animated, and it is usually very animated, it lapses into Polish. It is a

pleasant language to listen to, and when one hardly understands one word in a thousand, it is easy to credit every speaker with a pretty wit. And yet, in spite of all the vivacity, there is a vein of sadness which runs for ever just below the surface. "Wring a clod of earth in your hands," they tell you, "anywhere in all our land, and blood drips out." The Poles are homesick exiles who yet dwell in their own country, passionate nationalists who are no longer a nation, and the remembrance and the humiliation of it are never far away.

Another couple of hours' driving brought us to the little forest-town where we were to spend the night. We had two gaunt, whitewashed rooms in the small hostelry, with red geraniums in the windows, and little else beyond clean white beds in every corner. It has never been ascertained whether we dined in our bed-room or slept in the dining-room, but we managed to do both very satisfactorily. The place is hardly a town at all, hardly even a village, only a few houses scattered on a hillside above the river, with a bronze church and a sort of easy-going tavern opposite our little inn to give it consistency. There were crowds of feast-day folk about, in from the valleys round, laughing, talking, flirting, as people do everywhere. But people everywhere are not so handsome, nor dressed in such faultless taste, nor have they such admirable manners, as those mountaineers. We took a scrambly walk with an Adonis

of twenty as guide, and the way in which he helped us at rough places, always ready but never officious, the courteousness with which he entered into our enjoyment, and by sheer sympathy divined the meaning of our exclamations, showed how absolute naturalness and the best of breeding are often synonymous. Once, as a conscript, he had been for a few months in the plains. Then his father died, and he was allowed to come back to his mother. He did not like the plainsnever wished to see them again.

Up here the pine-trees are the only begetters of bread and employment. They are cut far up in the mountains and floated, as rafts, away down the river to the Black Sea. Thence the wood goes to divers corners of the earth-much of it, they told us, to Egypt. One cannot but wonder if the pines are ever homesick-if they weary of the scorching sands, and long for the free, fresh air of the mountains. The men, the woodcutters and the raftsmen, when forced to go to serve their time in the army, suffer from homesickness so despairingly, so overpoweringly, that though they know they are only exiles for a limited time, many of them commit suicide rather than live through these three years.

The raft on which we embarked next morning differed only from its fellows in having benches and footstools of roughhewn planks made ready for our use: it was adorned, too, with a forest of little pines, which, as a secondary consideration, shaded our seats. Poles