While we were in Bucharest we received an invitation--"command" is the correct word according to court usage--to visit the King and Queen of Rumania at their Château of Pelesch, near Sinaia, in the Carpathians. It is about a hundred miles by road from the capital to Sinaia and the first half of the journey, which we made by motor, was over a road as execrable as any we found in the Balkans. Upon reaching the foothills of the Carpathians, however, the highway, which had been steadily growing worse, suddenly took a turn for the better--due, no doubt, to the invigorating qualities of the mountain atmosphere--and climbed vigorously upward through wild gorges and splendid pine forests which reminded me of the Adirondacks of Northern New York. Notwithstanding the atrocious condition of the highway, which constantly threatened to dislocate our joints as well as those of the car, and the choking, blinding clouds of yellow dust, every change of figure on the speedometer brought new and interesting scenes. For mile after mile the road, straight as though marked out by a ruler, ran between fields of wheat and corn as vast as those of our own West. In spite of the fact that the Austro-Germans carried off all the animals and farming implements they could lay their hands on, the agricultural prosperity of Rumania is astounding. In 1916, for example, while involved in a terribly destructive war, Rumania produced more wheat than Minnesota and about twenty-five times as much corn as our three Pacific Coast states combined. At frequent intervals we passed huge scarlet threshing machines, most of them labeled "Made in U.S.A.," which were centers of activity for hundreds of white-smocked peasants who were hauling in the grain with ox-teams, feeding it into the voracious maws of the machines, and piling the residue of straw into the largest stacks I have ever seen. As we drew near the mountains the grain fields gave way to grazing lands where great herds of cattle of various breeds--brindled milch animals, massive cream-colored oxen, blue-gray buffalo with elephant like hides and broad, curving horns, and gaunt steers that looked for all the world like Texas longhorns--browsed amid the lush green grass.