my hat when I traversed it. There was not a bell in the house, and, if I had not had my own servant with me, who was placed in a room near mine, I should have been helpless. And yet the doors of this dwelling were guarded by a porter in crimson robes, who wielded a staff of office topped by a prince's coronet. Most of the dishes at dinner might have come from some rough farmhouse, but the pastry could hardly have been equaled by the finest _chef_ in Paris, while the walls of the circular dining room were daubed with theatrical pillars, so that it looked like a ruined temple on the stage of some company of strolling players in a barn. Other contrasts and other notable things I discovered as the days went by. The whole of the lower portion of one side of the house was a museum of family archives, many of them going back to the beginning of the fourteenth century, and most of the attic floor--a kind of museum likewise--was crowded with precious spoils taken by the Batthyanys from the Turks--jeweled swords and muskets, horsecloths sewn with emeralds, and pavilions, still splendid, which once had sheltered Pashas in the field. Another curiosity was a theater still displaying the scenery which had been painted for some private performance before the end of the eighteenth century. During the first week of my visit the Princess and I were alone, and considerately for most of the day she left me to my own devices. I had brought out with me to Cannes a diary of my life in Cyprus, and, inspired by my present surroundings, I set myself to begin a task which more than once I had contemplated--the task of working my notes into a small coherent book. I very soon found this pursuit absorbing, and my hostess realized that my entertainment would be far from burdensome to herself. Meanwhile when we were together I was never weary of questioning her with regard to Hungarian life. She told me all sorts of quaint and curious things. She told me of robbers who still haunted the forests--of forest gypsies whose lives were a mixture of theft and music, and who often twanged their instruments in a tavern near the castle gates. She told me of former Batthyanys and of other castles once possessed by them. She told me how the latest alterations of Koermend had been made to satisfy the whims of a beautiful French mistress whom a Batthyany had brought there from the court of Louis Quatorze. Sometimes she asked to dinner a priest and also one of the agents called Molna, in whom she reposed great confidence. When I was talking with the agent the Princess played the part of interpreter. The priest and I took refuge in bad Latin. I copied his pronunciation, and we both of us threw Ciceronian language to the winds. On the whole we were mutually intelligible, and we differed so favorably from the talkers of the fashionable world that we both of us meant a great deal more than we said. One of the questions as to which I was most anxious for