Beyond the race course the Chaussée bifurcates. One branch I have already called Rumania’s “Great North Road,” it leads, as its name implies, due north to the oilfields and the mountains; the other is a humbler route, trending westward across a stretch of open country towards a wooded, dim horizon. It I will name Rumania’s “Pilgrim’s Way.” When I was a dweller in the plain, few houses, large or small, stood on “The Pilgrim’s Way,” which, after dipping to a stream, curved to the west and followed the northern bank, its bourne some feathery treetops, its only guardians cohorts of unseen frogs, whose multitudinous voices rose in chorus, ranging the diapason of croaking, guttural sounds. This was no intermediate zone athwart the road to Hades, but the frontier of a region known to some as “Sleeping Waters,” whose chief city was a garden on the stream’s bank and beyond the distant trees. The votaries of wealth and recreation followed the “Great North Road,” seeking Ploesti’s oily treasures or villas and a casino at Sinaia, where the gay world of Bucharest breathed mountain air in the Carpathian foothills, and summer heat was tempered amid perennial pines. “The Pilgrim’s Way” was less frequented, but the pilgrims, though not numerous, were, not the less select. Among them were the Monarch and his Queen, the Prime Minister, the representatives of several foreign Powers, and men and women bearing names which rang like echoes of Rumania’s history when Princes ruled the land. If asked why they made their pilgrimage so often, the pilgrims would have answered with a half-truth: “We seek serenity in a garden fair, and shade and quiet after the city’s heat and noise”--they certainly did not go to meet each other, nor did they, like Chaucer’s characters, tell tales and gossip as they fared along the road--they went to the same shrine, but went separately, they made their vows to the same Deity, but they made them one by one. Two landmarks lay beside the road, serving as measures of the Pilgrim’s Progress, both were pathetic and symbolical--one was a broken bridge, which was always being repaired in slow and dilatory fashion, the other a mill, which never appeared to work. Bratiano himself had built bridges in his youth, and, speaking both as expert and Prime Minister, he declared one day that when the bridge would be completely mended Rumania would forswear neutrality and join the Allied Cause. A whimsical conceit indeed, but illustrative of its author’s mood. When Italy, a Latin and a sister State, bound, like Rumania, by a Treaty to both the Central Powers, had taken the irrevocable step, work was resumed upon the bridge with greater energy; but soon it languished, and blocks of rough-hewn stone encumbered the wayside, mute symbols of the hesitation which was still torturing a cautious statesman’s mind.