delivered from death and bonds by a valiant horseman
passing by at an opportune moment, or
attracted to her rescue by spiritual influences.
The horseman always has golden hair and a
radiant face, enchanted arms, and a steed fleeter
than the wind. The demon flees at his
appearance, and he bears off the beautiful captive
to his home, and receives a kingdom for her
dowry. Another fancy of the Wallachian
peasantry is that every leaf and flower has life
and immortality. They suppose that leaves
and flowers are the habitations of imprisoned
souls, and their songs upon this subject have
a freshness and pathos hardly to be found in
the popular ballads of any other country. The
Wallachian doine, or folk lore, has something
of an Ossianic character; but, instead of
representing the thoughts of a stern solemn
people living in a misty mountain-land, it
breathes the ardent spirit of a southern race,
inhabiting a delightful climate, beautiful with
purple skies and gorgeous flowers.

Between the imaginative and the actual life
of the Wallachian peasantry there is a dark and
dreary gulf. The British traveller experiences
considerable difficulty in disconnecting their
personal appearance from that of chimney
sweepers. Their neighours, the Russians and
the Turks, are both bath-loving people. The
Turks are scrupulously and delicately clean.
Cleanliness is a part of their religion, and is
an inborn want and necessity of most of the
Oriental races. But the Wallachian peasant
never performs any sort of ablution, from the
cradle to the grave. Water is often a
scarcity in the Roumanian villages; but the
peasant who inhabits the banks of the Danube
is quite as dirty as his fellow-countryman who
resides in the interior. The meanest hut in
Turkey proper has appliances for washing;
the hovel of the Roumanian peasant has
none. In Turkey the women of the meanest
household may seclude themselves in some sort
of decent privacy. Not so in Roumania. The
Wallachian peasant, his family, his pigs, a
few dogs, and perhaps a sick pony, live all
together in an oblong hole, with an opening at
the top to let out the smoke and another to
creep through when they would go abroad.
The Turk loves light and air; the Wallachian
lives in utter darkness.

He is quite as unlike his Russian neighbour.
A Wallachian peasant will get drunk now and
then, but drunkenness is not by any means his
habitual vice. His idea of earthly felicity is to
lie down on his back in the sunshine, with a
select circle of female acquaintances, and drone
out songs through his nose, with his eyes shut.
He will pursue this entertainment with great
industry and enjoyment for many hours at a
time, if left uninterrupted in the peaceful exercise
of his natural inclination. He is perhaps
sensual, but his sensuality is of a peculiar kind,
and is not at all coarse or gross like the sensuality
of the bumpkins of the north and west. It is
chiefly made up of laziness. He delights in
being idle. Of the pleasures of eating he has
no conception, and is as lean as a herring.
A dozen Wallachian ploughmen have not a
pound of fat among them, and hardly an ounce
of muscle. They are soft, flabby, loosely made
creatures, of whom an Englishman of ordinary
physical force could tie a dozen by the heels
together with a wisp of hay.

If a strong man collar one of these people in
anger, the creature seems to shrink and shrivel
in his sheepskin, and cannot well be grappled. A
generous man would no more strike one of them
than he would hit a child. They are great liars,
and apt enough to make busy folk who have
anything to do with them rather angry. But when
caught in any trick, their great tender
appealing eyes and quaking limbs plead too
successfully to permit indignation to take an
active form of hostility. There seems
something softening and enervating in the moist,
warm, marshy air around them. Even the wolves,
who are fierce in Russia, are cowardly, tame,
skulking brutes on the Lower Danube, fit
merely to carry off a pet lamb, or an
invalid gosling. The horses, so spirited and
strong in Hungary, and so fine in Turkey, are
but scraggy dejected little brutes in Roumania,
rarely above twelve or thirteen hands high, and
quite unfit for the saddle. Everything in
these countries seems equally enervated and
spiritless. Hunting and shooting, among the most
boisterous of sports in other places, are but
tame, gentle sort of craft in Wallachia. The
principal game is the bustard: a gigantic species
of wild turkey, which has now almost disappeared
from the British islands, but is still found in
great abundance among the interminable bogs
and marshes of the Danubian Principalities.
This bird (who revenges himself with great
acrimony upon his human persecutors, by
presenting the toughest flesh ever penetrated by
mortal tooth), is held in great esteem, and every
one who has a gun, devotes a portion of his
leisure and energies to the pursuit of this
indigestible game. But, instead of putting on a
pair of double-soled boots and leather gaiters,
and striding off boldly after his birds, the Wallachian
sportsman lies down in a cart, and causes
himself to be driven into a bog: where he
waits until some misguided bustard comes
near, and then leisurely takes a pot shot at
him.

The surprise of a covey of English partridges
at seeing a person coming after them in a
four-wheeled waggon, would doubtless be considerable
but it probably does not astonish the bustards
who have been accustomed to accept
martyrdom on those conditions, from time
immemorial. The marsh lands of the Lower Danube
are among the best shooting grounds that
advancing civilisation has left in Europe. They
swarm with incredible multitudes of wild-fowl
of every description. Ducks and geese, now
grown rare in Western Europe, are met
with in such numbers as to look like clouds in
the air, when upon the wing; and in some parts
of the country, hares and partridges are equally
numerous; while snipe may be shot as fast as