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A RUN TO VIENNA AND PESTH.

IT WAS on the 30th of April, the day before the World's Exhibition opened, that I reached Vienna. When I left Scotland sixty-six hours before, the sun was bright and warm, and everything promised spring. Vienna is eight degrees of latitude, or 550 miles south of my northern home, not to speak of the twenty degrees of east longitude-and it was a bitter disappointment to find that I had left all the brightness and warmth behind me. It was raw in London; it was gusty and uncomfortable about Dover and Óstend; it was raining as the train crawled, an hour and a half late, into the capital of the Eastern Empire. Their own familiar May, laden with influenza, was in readiness, a truly delightful surprise for the English visitors. It neither surprised nor shocked the Viennese. Vienna is very cold when it is cold, and very hot when it is hot. It rains a great deal there, it snows a little, it blows bitterly at times. To-day the sun makes the place as hot as an Italian market-place in a blazing summer. To-morrow the winds that sweep down the long trough of the Danube, or through the gaps of the encircling hills, chill one to the bone. People say that a fall of 30° Fahrenheit in the course of a day is not uncommon, and chest complaints are dangerous and abundant. Everybody who goes to see the World's Exhibition should prepare for heat and cold, and dust and rain, and mud, and, above all, sudden and violent changes of temperature.

The first of May, the morning big with the fate of Baron von Schwartz Senborn and the Austrian Empire, was as depressing as it well could be. From low thick clouds a sleety drizzle dripped on the innumerable strangers who were supposed to have been gathered from all ends of the earth to witness the opening at the low charge of fifty shillings a-piece. From the Stephan's Platz, which is an apology for a square in the centre of the city, and as like a square as St. Paul's Churchyard, an interminable line of omnibuses and carriages streamed outwards over the three miles which lay between it and the Exhibition gates. Early people started at eight; those who were not to be hurried, at nine; those who were always too late for everything thought ten time enough to

enable them to get to the gates at eleven. At eleven the programme said that every entrance was to be closed; the interval till noon, when the Emperor and his Imperial and Royal guests were to open the Exhibition, being sacred to the admission of officials and the great people who were not to be jostled among the meaner crowd. The programme broke down, as it was no doubt meant it should; for when eleven came, a mile or two of carriages in continuous lines still stretched on the wrong side of the gates. The envious weather deprived the Viennese of more than half the pleasures of this great People'sExhibition on the road to the real show. The open carriages were very few, and the toilettes in them were very much subdued. Broughams are disappointing to the most contented crowd, and even the hundreds of thousands who lined the road two, three, and four deep, on both sides of it, as we got into the Prater and neared the gates, would have found time hang heavy on their hands on that raw, drizzly morning but for the uniforms of all nations which went flashing past incessantly. There was the most wonderful variety and richness of costume. The Hungarian noble on a State occasion is a sight to which the imagination of untravelled Western Europe is scarcely equal, and the crowd supped full of ambassadors, and archdukes, and Hospodars, and Hungarians, and Pashas, and full-dress generals and admirals of all the armies and navies of Europe. At the end of all this there was the Emperor and Empress, and half Princes Royal and Princes Imperial, and it was content to wait.

Everybody now knows the plan of the Exhibition. There is a cupola bigger than the dome of St. Paul's, under which is the great central space called the Rotunda. In the middle of this the framework of the magnificent fountain, which is to diffuse fragrance and refreshing coolness through the sultry summer, was covered, on the opening day, with evergreens. A great central space, like the saw-dust of a circus, separated it from the crowds of spectators, whose seats were in rows slanting to the inner line of pillars. Between them and the outer wall was a huge belt of floor space, meant for the crowds who could not find

sitting-room. Unfortunately there were no crowds, for miles of carriages contain, after all, but a limited number of human beings, and the first fifty-shilling day appealed but feebly to the masses. It promised nothing but the presence of Emperors and Princes, and the undeniable fact that it was the first. Of course there was a little music, and the great rotunda-the work, by the bye, of our able countryman, Mr. John Scott, Russell-showed for the first time how admirably it is adapted for musical purposes when filled with people. But, after all, music, and emperors, and the fine dresses of fashionable people, are not irresistible attractions, and I should guess that the spectators who occupied the rotunda were somewhere between ten and twenty thousand.

Of course there was a little excitement when the great people entered. Before us were a dozen of the most exalted ladies and gentlemen of Europe advancing to take their seats on the raised daïs in front of what looked like an organ. The music led, and the great company joined in the "Gott erhalt den Kaiser Franz," and twenty minutes of mutual speeches, broken by intervals of music, followed. Not a word could be heard, and there was nothing to occupy us but admiration of the vast proportions of the huge rotunda, from the top of which workmen and the special correspondents, watching us from the gallery at the base of the dome, looked like distant crows. Half-a-dozen objects in the rotunda were forecasts of the great collection of the more striking and showy" exhibits" of all nations which is now gathered there. There was a huge hexagonal tent bedstead by Bossi. There were two gigantic and noble female figures from Switzerland, to represent the federal friendship of the united cantons. There were a couple of monstrous lions, which from the opposite side of the hall, where I stood, looked little larger than young Newfoundlands; and there was an enormous stearine bust of Milly, the great introducer of stearine soaps and candles into Germany. Milly was alone and pre-eminent, as Goethe, or Dante, or Shakespeare might have stood to claim the reverence of the assembled nations. The exhibition, as I found out afterwards, is full of stearine statues and wax-candle trophies and soap virtù; and, except for the shining sort of glaze upon them, they look as white and

nearly as pure as marble. But Milly on the great opening day, in the centre of everything, under the admiring eyes of an Emperor and Empress and nearly a dozen Crown Princes and Crown Princesses, had reached a place quite too pre-eminent even for his saponaceous merits.

When the speeches were over, the great people began their "Rundreise." They were received everywhere by the Commissioners of the different countries, and for an hour or more the crowd in the rotunda sat still or gossiped, or sought for new places from which they could have a better chance of seeing their Majesties on their return. When they came back the Exhibition was open, and we might go everywhere. A little went a long way. There were many curious things, but the most curious of all, as I found out in the next day or two, was the skill with which the chaos of packing-cases and the innumerable sheds full of mere confusion that were everywhere, had been hid away. Nearly every nation was unready. Switzerland and Belgium were farthest forward. Next came England, then Germany, then Austria, then France. America had literally nothing but a curious charcoal wallpainting, some 40 feet long by 10 feet high, representing the eventful history of the unsuspecting Pig of Cincinnati, who is seduced into an establishment from which in a few brief hours he emerges as sausage and flitch of bacon. Perhaps an eighth part of the things meant to be shown were visible on the opening day. Everything is no doubt ready now, and before I left I was willing to allow that nothing yet seen in Exhibitions was to be compared with the Great World's Show in the capital which offers itself as the natural meeting of East and West.

A simple illustration may give some idea of the size of the building. Take a penny to represent the rotunda, and run out four quarter-inch spokes from it, through the ends of which, enclosing the penny, draw a square. The spokes and the sides of the square are galleries, given up half to Austria and half to Germany, and the side of the square is some 600 feet. The western spoke, the western side of the square and half of the two transverse ones, belong to Germany, and those opposite to Austria. Continue the western and eastern spoke across the square for 1,000 feet each way-as far as three

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pennies would go--and we have the long galleries which form the backbone of the Exhibition building for western and eastern countries. Across each of these backbones run fourteen ribs, seven on each side the line across being some 600 feet: make these ribs also exhibiting galleries, and you have the chief building. The intercostal places are fitted with supplementary sheds when these are needed. If they were all so fitted, the centre building of the Exhibition would be half a mile long by half a quarter mile broad-with Germany and Austria in the centre, the United States at one end, and Japan and China at the other. The advantages and disadvantages are alike obvious. All the products of each country pass under review, but each is by itself, and you forget the details of the one before you get to the other. Anybody who wants, for instance, to compare the cottons of Switzerland and France and Austria and America must walk huge distances from country to country.

But there are three or four devices to mitigate this hardship. To begin with, much of the machinery can only be seen and judged when it is running, and the machinery of all nations has been sent off accordingly into one great supplemental shed behind the main building, and parallel to it, where "power" can be turned on. The engineer and machinist may find a good deal belonging to him in the Industry Palace, but he will give days or weeks to the Machinery hall. Between it and the main Exhibition there is a show of what one may perhaps call dead machinery -steam ploughs, and threshing machines, and all the infinite contrivances which have made agriculture a scientific profession. The agricultural sheds are two in number—an eastern for Austria, Russia, and Hungary; and a western for France, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, and America. The space between them and that between them and the Exhibition, is filled up with smaller collections. There are heaps of peasants' and farmers' houses of all countries. There are gatherings of all the products of their estates by noblemen with thousands of square miles of territory. There is the show of the Austrian University of Agriculture, which presents us with the ploughs of all nations for the last 100 years, and illustrates all the agricultural products of Austria and Hun

gary. These are but samples taken at random of the curiosities outside in the grounds.

Besides the engineers and the farmers, there is one other competition of all nations which a visitor may witness without travelling round the Exhibition world. The pictures and statuary are grouped in a separate building, near the Japanese and Turkish portions of the Industry Palace. Each country exhibits by itself, but it is possible to run, rapidly through them all, as there is nothing but art to distract the attention. It is wonderfully well worth while. I have no desire to offer you my flying impressions of the artistic qualities of the great national schools. I had only three days to see them in, for the Emperor only opened the Art Exhibition on the 15th, and even then France had but one of five rooms ready, and Germany had none. Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, were fairly ready, and Italy as yet showed only half of what she intended to display.

It is this universal Internationalism, so to speak, that gives its individual character to the Vienna Exhibition. In London and Paris all the world was nominally represented, but Eastern Europe was too far removed from either to make its presence felt. Vienna is the geographical capital of the whole of the Old World that is civilized. Of the 56,000 square metres in the main building, 18,000 are given to Austria and Hungary, and 19,000, or nearly the same, to Germany, France, Great Britain, and Ireland, the great commercial countries of the Old World and those chiefly represented at London and in Paris. Russia is a little disappointing, for it occupies only 3,300 square metres, which is scarcely more than Hungary or Turkey. Taking the floor space, Austria has two and a half times as much as Great Britain; Germany and France have each the same as we have; Russia, Hungary, and Turkey, each half as much; Italy and Belgium, one-third as much each; China, Siam, and Japan, one-fifth as much, which is nearly the space assigned to the United States, to South America, to Switzerland and to Egypt and Mid-Africa. Holland, Greece, and the Scandinavian Peninsula have each about an eighth of what we have; Roumania, Spain, and Portugal, each about a tenth; Persia and Mid-Asia and Tunis and Morocco, each a twentieth.

In the Vienna Exhibition, in fact, one realizes the East as it is almost impossible to realize it elsewhere. Even in the city of Vienna there is a certain Eastern odor faintly perceptible, but it is very faint. There are very few Hungarian or Slavonic names in the streets, and hardly any Hungarian or Slavonic faces. Of course one meets a Turk or two, and " Magyar spoken here" is as common as "Ici on parle Français" in London, but Vienna is a thoroughly German city. It is brisker and sprightlier than Berlin, but a German is as much at home in it as anywhere in Germany, and everybody else is as much abroad. Pass the gates of the Exhibition, and all this is altered. The great palace of the Viceroy of Egypt, with the towers prepared for the 300 white figures that are to be brought over to remind him of Cairo, during his stay here, is one of the most prominent objects. The Japanese Tea Garden and the colony of Turkish houses cluster in the immediate neighborhood. Swedish hunting lodges, and Portuguese schools, and Hungarian and Styrian wine-houses, and Indian wigwams, where genuine negro waiters compound. Catawba cobblers and mint juleps; and Swiss conditoreis, where coffee and fruitsweetmeats are dispensed by girls gorgeous in gold and linen and bright colors from all the countries,-enable one to survey mankind from China to Peru. Per sians and Turks and Japanese-are frequent in the grounds, and all nations are abundant in the long sheds and galleries. Oddly enough, everybody seems to find the most interesting things to be those from home. It is in the British Exhibition that Englishmen most abound, and Russians haunt the region of iron and coal and malachite tables and furs and bear-skins.

One of the most striking things about Vienna is the enormous number of new and magnificent buildings that are being run up everywhere. The old Kaiser-stadt had some 70,000 inhabitants shut up close within the iron circle of the famous fortifications. But Sadowa proved that now-adays capitals are lost and won upon the battle-field; and the Emperor decided upon sweeping them away and replacing them by a broad ring of open boulevards connecting city and suburb, as the old walls had divided them. A huge street, four or five miles long, worthy of the capital of Eastern Europe, sprang up as if by

magic. Long lines of stately palaces, five and six storeys high, unrolled themselves when fashion and luxury trooped to the new Rings. New building societies sprang up like mushrooms, as the earliest realized fortunes, and the banks vied with each other in giving them facilities. The circle of the Rings is not yet completed; and he great crisis which shook the fabric of Austrian credit to its foundations, and in a single month lowered the value of the Austrian securities dealt in on the Vienna Stock Exchange by fifty millions sterling, must have ruined crowds of the building speculators who had calculated on the unlimited expansion of the city and its luxury. In the beginning of May the whole place seemed undergoing a gigantic transformation. Huge half-finished buildings everywhere swarmed with armies of laborers, and carpenters and bricklayers buzzed about them like so many uneasygoing ants. Mutatis mutandis-Vienna for Drury Lane, and Bohemian for Irish it was the scene in the " Rejected Addresses" over again :

"Ropes rose and sank, and rose again, And nimble workmen trod;

To realize bold Wyatt's plan
Rush'd many a howling Irishman,
Loud clatter'd many a porter can,
And many a ragamuffin clan,

With trowel and with hod."

Three quarters of the boulevards were filled. up with bran-new palaces, and the other quarter with palaces still in the hands of the builder. It was very much the same in most of the suburbs. The sense of transformation under one's very eyes-the visible growth from an old-fashioned fortress town to a great capital open alike to friends and foes-explained the fever of the streets, the breakneck pace of the drivers, and the sense of activity everywhere around you. But you need not go far a-field to see the countries of the years before Sadowa. Enter the town from some village in the outskirts-say Hetzendorf, for instance, and you will find roads so uneven that you could bury a sheep in their deep holes, bearing the traffic of a wide and fertile country district to the very gates of one of the greatest capitals of Europe. Nowhere. are the old and the new in sharper contrast than in Austria. Vienna is the incarnation of the feverish energy and vivacity of the new. The villages about her, and for that

matter the outdoor laborers in the city itself, enable one to understand the old.

After a few days the Exhibition tired me, for mountains of packing-cases were arriving every day from the railway stations, where they had been blocked for months. After the exhibition there is little to fall back upon but the Opera, the concerts, and the theatre. The picture galleries seemed to me comparatively uninteresting; and after spending a few evenings in admiring the perfect training of orchestra and chorus, the beauty of the scenic effects, and the general level excellence of the acting at the Opera, I made the excursion which most visitors to Vienna will be tempted to make this season, and ran down the Danube to Pesth. Shakespeare, by the way, is in great favor in Vienna. I saw "Romeo and Juliet" admirably performed by a better general company, and one which showed a truer appreciation of this author, than I remembered to have seen at home; and Nikolai's version of the" Merry Wives of Windsor" was performed one evening at the Opera. Frau Fluth and Frau Reich -Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page-were admirable; and Sir John was, out of sight, the best Sir John I have happened to come across. No doubt he is the difficulty of the opera, and the farcicalness of the part needs to be exaggerated a little to adapt it to the altered conditions. But the brisk and sparkling dialogue of the "Merry Wives," and the love passages of Master Fenton, suit opera admirably; and the ballet of the fairies who pinch the fat knight in the wood, makes a magnificent spectacular close.

The way to Pesth and back recommended by the guide-books and sanctioned by common sense, is to go down the Danube in the steamer, which takes thirteen hours, and come back by train, which takes seven. The current, which runs nearly five miles an hour at Vienna, and three miles an hour at Pesth, makes up-stream sailing slow and weary work, and the voyage takes twice as long as the voyage down. It is something even to have seen the great river of Central Europe. I had stood before on the naked tableland in the Black Forest, between Furtwangen and Donauschwingen, from which the waters divide, flowing westward to the Rhine and the German Ocean, and eastward to the Black Sea. Years ago I had seen the Danube rush, fierce, deep, and narrow, past the quaint old towers and

On

the quainter old cathedral of Ulm. the road to Vienna I had caught casual glimpses of it in the distance, and the city itself is on a branch of the river. But it is only the Regulirte Donau, a bit of the Danube turned into a Vienna canal. We embarked on the Regulated Danube at half-past six, and half-an-hour later were transferred to the bigger boat that was to take us all the way. It was a miserable morning of low grey clouds and sullen streaming rain, without promise or hope. For hours and hours there was nothing to intérest but the swift-rushing river beneath, tearing onward like a mill-race to the sea. The" schöne blaue Donau" between Vienna and Pesth is a turbid, clay-colored torrent, that bends and swirls away through interminable flat plains, fringed by osier beds, and apparently empty of population. Every now and then it breaks up into two or three channels, and encloses some long flat island like Lobau, where Napoleon and 180,000 of the best soldiers in Europe were imprisoned for six weeks, after the checks of Aspern and Essling, only to burst out on their Austrian keepers the night before the decisive victory of Wagram. A few wretched villages-one that was “taken by Attila"-a stray farm or two in the far distance, a cart drawn by four oxen, a colony of water-mills, alone interrupt the monotony. These Danube water-mills are odd-looking institutions. In those great plains wind is an unreliable "power," which lies idle for weeks or months, and when it comes often comes in hurricanes. Except the Danube and its tributaries there is little water, and the farmers drive their grain from long distances across the roadless plains to these primitive grinding shops. Two broad flat-bottomed boats are moored together, and on the one nearest the stream a house is constructed for the miller. the current is strongest near the middle of the river, he anchors his house, and his mill, which is built on the second boat, as near the centre as he can, to be out of the highway of the steamers and other craft. His mill is simple. A trunk of a tree seems to be the axle, and transverse boards, containing the spokes of the water-wheel, splash round and receive in succession the blows of the current. Half-a-dozen, or sometimes a dozen of these curiosities may be moored one behind the other, a little village of amphibious animals.

As

The river sweeps through a gap of some

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