To happen, as I did, on my first visit upon a busy market day in Pozsony (Pressburg) is to participate in a scene of animation about which one is tempted to linger. At the top of the irregular market place stand a number of long narrow wagons with basketwork sides, laden with vegetables and drawn by large buff-coloured bullocks. Passing into the crowd of peasants and townsfolk, we see wares displayed on stalls or spread over the ground in a glorious confusion of colour. Roughly, the sellers of commodities seem to classify themselves. At one side of the “Platz” are the sellers of bread in many forms, in another part are to be seen rows of boot and shoe sellers, dealers in drapery and haberdashery. Glancing up a court we may notice a buxom peasant woman trying on a pair of high leather boots reaching above the knees. A little beyond are the dealers in fruit and vegetables; great mounds of dark green melons, like large cannon balls, are piled up, and here and there one that has been cut or broken reveals the beautifully contrasting purplish red of the flesh within; broad baskets or tubs tilted to one side show masses of paprika, the national condiment, a delicate red pepper the rare savour of which some visitors fail to recognize. All round are peasants who have brought in their wares, sometimes of the slightest, that they may make something if it be but a few fillers by the transactions; sometimes the wares consist of but a few handfuls of half-ripe beans of various kinds, sometimes of three or four dozen tomatoes, good, bad, or indifferent. From the vegetables, past the vendors of herbs and of flowers, cut and in pots, we come to rows of women selling butter and cream and cheese, and beyond them are stalls after stalls at which ready cooked geese and ducks are being sold whole or by the half or quarter bird, and beyond these again are the butchers’ booths. At the lower end of the market place live geese and fowls are being disposed of, while under the acacias that surround a statue sits a circle of women each of whom has spread upon the ground by her little heaps of various fungi unknown to English culinary art--“toadstools” of all shapes and sizes and colours. These fungi-sellers are a noticeable feature of many of the markets that we visit, but here and at Ratisbon they seemed more numerous than elsewhere. The whole scene is perhaps typical of many of the markets that may be visited, but it was the busiest of those which I happened to see. One is struck by the absence of any marked characteristics of local costume--the various coloured head kerchiefs are much the same as those to be found in places far apart as Bohemia and northern Spain, two dominant notes of colour being “butchers’ blue” in the women’s gowns, and a warm yellow-brown in the kerchief. Of striking costume but little is to be seen unless the visitor penetrates further from the river highway, or unless he happens upon some special festival.