legends about snakes wearing precious crowns, which on occasion they will carelessly lay down on the grass, where, if luck should lead you that way, you may seize them and so ensure to yourself untold riches--provided that you can manage to get safely away. In the mountainous country about Bautzen and Loebau in Saxony, where the scenery is fine, the air bracing, the soil mostly fat, nineteenth century levelling has been far too long at work for race customs to have maintained themselves altogether pure. There stand the ancient sacrificing places of the Wends, the Czorneboh, sacred to the "black god," the Bjeliboh, sacred to the "white" one--respectively, the Mounts Ebal and Gerizim of Wendland--and many more. Wendish traditions and Wendish speech are still very rife in those parts. And most of the brains of the race are to be found in that well-cultivated district--the "Wendish Mozart," Immisch, Hornigk, Pfuhl--all the literary coryphæi of the race. From Bautzen, certainly, with its bipartite cathedral, in which Roman Catholics and Protestants worship peaceably side by side, divided only by a grating, it is quite impossible to dissociate Wendish traditions. That is to the Upper Lusatians what Cottbus is to the lower--_mjesto_, "the town" _par excellence_. There are very true Wends in those regions still. In a village near Hochkirch the community managed for a long time successfully to keep out Germans, refusing to sell any property otherwise than to a Wend. But under the influence of advancing civilisation so many things externally peculiar to the race have disappeared--their forests, and their wooden buildings, much of their ancient dress; they live so much in the great world, that they can scarcely be said to have kept up their peculiar race-life in absolute purity.