Orsova is one of those places possessing the indefinable qualities which we sum up as “charm,” though no small part of it is, doubtless, due to its position. The country about it offers goodly variety for the pedestrian. At a short distance from it, may be visited a village which, though still in Hungary, is entirely Rumanian--a broad street of low white houses, and all the people we meet in the picturesque Rumanian peasant costumes, the women with white blouses decorated with red and blue Slavonic stitchery, with black aprons and closely embroidered belts, from which hang the many-coloured threads of the opraija, meeting the apron on either side, and giving a quaint effect over the white skirt beneath. Then there is the Orsova market--a close-set row of booths near the river, at which all sorts and conditions of things are sold, and where Hungarians, Rumanians, Servians, Turks and gipsies are to be seen thronging. Nearer the river, too, and adjoining the market is a bazaar where the Turks from Ada Kaleh dispose of their wares. While we were there, we learned that an encampment of the Tsigane (gipsies) was to be seen two or three miles away, and through the Rumanian village, past grassy levels starred with myriads of autumn crocuses, we journeyed to it. The tents were pitched on a bluff above a nearly dry river-bed, in a newly cut maize field. Among the tents, we seemed taken back to a time before even the Romans came. The men with their long curly locks, their clear-cut Phœnician-like profiles, seemed to take us back to times but dimly known, while the nude children, the primitive tents, suggested that we were not far from the period when “wild in woods the naked savage ran,” though these particular “savages” were sophisticated enough to beg with fawning volubility during our stay in their unsavoury encampment. A few miles inland from Orsova, in a lovely confined valley, is Mehadia (Herkulesbad)--a celebrated “cure,” the hot-springs of which have been celebrated from the times of the Romans. [Illustration: THE CROWN CHAPEL, ORSOVA]