cost of royal blood. But the ravisher had escaped immediately after the commission of his crime, and his absence served only to irritate the impatient spirit of the wretched father. From moment to moment his fury became more ungovernable, until at last he was no longer master of himself. Availing himself of the moment when the royal family was at table, Zacs rushed into the room, and in default of the victim whom he wished to immolate, addressed himself to the queen, and with a single blow of his saber severed the four fingers of the right hand. In vain the king sought to defend his wife. Zacs wounded him also in the hand, and had

thrown himself upon the two sons of the prince, when several noblemen who were present rushed together upon the intruder, and hewed him into pieces.

The violent death of Zacs did not satisfy the royal vengeance. The attendants of the king seized the son of the murdered man, and dragged him, attached to the tail of a horse, through the streets of the city until he was reduced to a hideous and lifeless mass.

The father's crime might have excused these frightful acts of vengeance committed in the first effervescence of rage, but those which followed, more terrible even than the former, could without doubt have been prevented by Charles Robert. They cut

off the nose, the lips, and the fingers of the unfortunate Clarissa, and in this mutilated condition compelled her to traverse the streets of Visegrad crying, "Behold how regicides are punished!" Vengeance was extended even to the third generation. The grandsons of Felicien Zacs were condemned to banishment, and all his relatives living at the time sacrificed with relentless cruelty.

Love of pilgrimage is quite as characteristic of the Catholic Austrian and Hungarian as of the Mussulman and Greek further east. I have visited the little mosque near Buda, on the bank of the

Danube, almost the only remaining memorial of the Turkish occupation, where a few pious Moslems annually repair to repeat their orisons by the tomb of a Moslem saint. A number of Hungarians also perform an annual pilgrimage to the grave of King Wadislas, at Didokoi, near Vaena; and who, O reader, has not heard of the multitudes who yearly throng Our Lady of Loretto and Maria Zell?

I am, indeed, not a little surprised to find pilgrimages so common in Austria. For many years they were discouraged by the government, but as everything is once more in the hands of the priests and the soldiers,

The pilgrims are for the most part peasants. Thus the poor, believing that they can win heaven only by fastings and pilgrimages, add the mortification of the spirit to their poverty, while the rich and powerful hope to reach heaven by the golden bridge of charity. Moreover, pilgrimages are to the humble what traveling and frequenting the great watering places are to the wealthy burghers. I do not question the motives of the humble devotees who wander hundreds of miles to visit some miracle-working shrine. Who can be more sincere and earnest than they, "working out in their peculiar manner the great business of salvation ?" Yet I am not of the opinion that the journey to Loretto or Maria Zell carries them any nearer heaven. Pilgrimages have a double charm in countries which, like Hungary and Austria, abound in magnificent scenery. The shrines are often built on the mountain tops, as if devotion in such a place were a foretaste of the pure joys in the heaven above. Wearing grotesque costumes, and headed by priests carrying banners or the cross, bands of pilgrims wend their way slowly through the wildest solitudes, chanting in a solemn and impressive manner, and mingling their weird strains with the sweet melody of the trees, the rocks, and running brooks.

At one stopping place on the Danube I visited the site of an old Roman city, and walked over the spot which must have been their cemetery. It is still used for the same purpose, and though not of great extent, is far more thickly peopled than the adjacent town. I spent a half hour studying the curious monuments and thinking how many nations had passed away, how many myriads of men had moldered into dust along the rushing waters of the Danube.

It is sometimes well to leave the throbbing cities of the living and wander in the silent cities of the dead. In this border land of the Christian and the Turk, I find the cemeteries everywhere surrounded by high walls. In earlier and stormier times the people often repaired to them with their families and goods. The Germans call the burial places of the dead Gottesacker, (harvest field of God,) and how beautifully does the name express the idea of gathering the fruits of

and the dead lie in lines as exact as the ranks of living squadrons. The Germans and Hungarians exhibit more taste than ourselves in writing epitaphs. They do not all at once discover a man's virtues when dead, and place an inscription over his tomb that would flatter his vanity if living. A simple word, as Asleep," "Not Forgotten," "He will rise again," are more appropriate, and lodge a sweeter thought in the mind of the passer-by, than the most elaborate eulogy.

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The Catholics of Austria, whatever estimate they may place upon the living, have far less regard for the human dust than is usual with ourselves. Post mortem examinations, which are so much abhorred by the Catholic population of our own country, are here rather desired than otherwise. They wish to be assured of the death of their friends, and the thought that the latter may turn in their graves, is far more dreadful than the sight of human blood and muscles.

If the traveler in Austria wishes to behold a sight which he can never forget, let him repair to the "Court of Death," attached to the great hospital of Vienna, whose inmates are numbered by thousands. The lifeless sleepers are extended on dark and gloomy palets, each holding in his hand a bell cord to give notice of returning animation, if by chance the vital spark still remains, the frailest thread to which hope can cling.

One, and but one, of its pale occupants has baffled the Lethean flood and returned to the shore of life. Once only has the little bell tinkled, breaking the long silence of years in that sepulchral chamber, and a seeming corpse, clad in the habiliments of the grave, rose from his couch and stalked forth among the living.

There was one place near the Austrian capital by which I never liked to pass. It was where the poor of Vienna were buried. During the long and silent hours of the night the dead wagon rattles over the stony streets of the imperial city, and after all the new victims of the remorseless destroyer have been gathered, it winds away to the cemetery, followed by no chanting priest or gurgling choir, by no mourner to shed a tear over buried love. When the Todtenwagen has reached its destination, the bodies, coffinless and naked as the grave, are thrown promiscuously into

I know of nothing more sad than Ovid's poems written in this distant region, and fairly perfumed with tearful memories of his native land. Born of a noble Roman family, and educated among the poets and rhetoricians of Athens, he was the sweet

There are many reminiscences of the poet Ovid in Eastern Europe. The Wallach peasant, still speaking a language that would have been understood in the provinces of Italy eighteen centuries ago, points with pride to the spot where, according to the tradition of the country, the Roman soldiers under Trajan hastened to visit the prison of the illustrious poet. Others have located Tomi, the place of his exile, on the shore of the Euxine.

On an eminence near Mount Mika, in Lower Hungary, is a small square structure bearing the marks of great antiquity, and known as the Tower of Ovid. Where in the wide domain of the Roman empire could the poet have more properly exclaimed:

"Lassus in extremis jaceo populisque, locisque: Heu! quam vicina est ultima terra mihi!"

collected at his court to paint in seductive colors the despotism which he was introducing in Rome. Ovid there gave himself up to a frivolous and licentious life, and wishing to reduce the "Art of Love" to a system, published a book under that title. For this offense, ostensibly, the poet was banished from Rome; but as the Augustan age was not remarkable for virtue in high places, the real character of his fault has doubtless never been made known. His verses moved a world to tears, but could affect neither the coldhearted Augustus nor Tiberius, the murderer of Germanicus.

He spent the last fifteen years of his life on the inhospitable banks of the Danube, ever sighing for that Rome which was the subject and inspiration of his verses. Let those who would prostitute their genius to the service of despotism, and kiss the hand which has smitten them to the dust, remember the fate of Publius Ovidius.