The Hungarians are a handsome race, and the people of Pesth and vicinity have especial claims to attention for their beauty. The men of the middle and upper classes are tall, slender, graceful, and their features are exceedingly regular and pleasing. The women are so renowned that a description of their charms is scarcely necessary. Beautiful as are the Viennese ladies in their early youth, they cannot rival their fellow-subjects of Hungary. The Austrian woman grows fat, matronly and rather coarse as she matures: the Hungarian lady of forty is still as willowy, graceful and capricious as she was at twenty. The peasant-women, poor things! are ugly, because they work from morning till night in the vineyards, toiling until their backs are broken. The wine which the beauties drink costs their humbler sisters their life-blood, their grace, their happiness. The sunshine of a thousand existences is imprisoned in the vintages of Pressburg and Carlowitz. Poor, homely toilers in the fields! Poor human creatures transformed into beasts of burden! The Hungarian nation owes it to itself to emancipate these struggling women and show them the way to better things. EDWARD KING. "FOR PERCIVAL." CHAPTER XLVIII ENGAGEMENTS--HOSTILE AND OTHERWISE. [Illustration] The fairest season of the year, the debatable ground between spring and summer, had come round once more. There were leaves on the trees and flowers in the grass. The sunshine was golden and full, not like the bleak brightness of March. The winds were warm, the showers soft. Percival, always keenly affected by such influences, felt as if a new life had come to him with the spring. Now that the evenings had grown long and light, he could escape into the country, breathe a purer air and wander in fields and lanes. And as he wandered, musing, it seemed to him that he had awakened from a dream.