Almost all Hungarian women are excellent cooks, and make an abundance of the highly seasoned tasty dishes in which their nation delights. The little strips of bacon, rolled in the national paprika or red pepper, are universally enjoyed. Strangers find the Hungarian cooking a little too rich for their taste, as a rule. Black coffee and tea made with tepid water are to be met everywhere; buffalo milk is preferred by the peasants, when they use any, to cow’s milk, which is considered thin. Sheep’s milk cheese is to be met with in almost every cottage, and bread sprinkled with carraway seeds is as ubiquitous as in Germany. Otherwise mutton and pork are generally procurable, beef less frequently, and skinny chickens if demanded. Rich cream sauces, smoked sausages and red pepper form ingredients of a large number of dishes. Eggs and butter are cheap, and boiled butter is used largely as hair oil. The Slavs, who form a full half of the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, are of another race altogether. Whether or no their ancestors were the original inhabitants of Eastern Europe is a disputed point, but certainly they have peopled vast tracts of it; the whole of Russia for instance, Bulgaria, Illyria, Poland, Silesia, Pomerania, Bohemia, and Croatia are all occupied by Slav peoples to-day. They are held to be a branch of the Aryan race, and are peaceful and agricultural in their habits, not warlike as the Magyars are. In the north part of the Empire they are usually fair, with blue eyes, and the children have a bleached appearance. Those who live up in the mountains exist chiefly on potatoes and cabbage or maize bread, and are often desperately poor. They are generally Catholics, Roman Catholicism being the dynastic religion of the Emperor. Numbers of the Slavs emigrate to America, in the hope of making enough money to return to their wild fastnesses in comfort. Among the Slavonic races the Czechs are the most advanced, in spite of their difficult and unpronounceable language. They have behind them a national history, coherent and full of stirring incident. This tends to give them racial self-respect, and though they have succumbed to pressure and become an integral part of the Austrian Empire the spirit of nationality is gaining rather than losing in vitality. The Roumanians are numerically the next in order in the Empire, and they are different again, having a touch of Latin blood, and being tall and dark-eyed and generally possessing very black hair. They tend sheep and work in the forests as their principal avocations. The Roumanians of the Empire live chiefly in Transylvania adjoining their own country, though separated from it by the Southern Carpathians. Mr. Drage in _Austria-Hungary_ says: