Besides the variety of singular anecdotes respecting the Countess and her household, the volume is enriched with many curious stories, scandalous, legendary, or superstitious. In a chapter entitled “The Neighbors,” we have the Austrian nobility at their country residences strikingly contrasted with the English _noblesse_. Here is an account of a dinner given the Captain at the castle of an Hungarian nobleman, near the village of St. Gothard. In the midst of these national discussions the dinner appeared; and as our morning's expedition had made us more than usually hungry, we looked forward with less dread than we had ever done before to the overloaded table, which all reports of the nature and extent of a German dinner led us to expect. But our fears on this score, if we had any, were groundless, for a less loaded repast never was seen. There was positively too little for the company, and we felt awkward at having, by our intrusion, diminished the scanty allowance of the family. Every dish was carried off the table as clean as if, instead of a goodly company of Hungarian ladies and gentlemen, with a couple of hungry heretics from England, the Baron had introduced a dozen of his wild boar hounds to lick the platters. As this was the only Hungarian dinner we saw during our stay in these parts, a notice of it may perhaps interest the lovers of good cheer. We had first of all coldish, dirty-looking, thin soup; then a plate with ill-cut slices of ill-salted tongue; and, after a long and dreary interval, a dish consisting of slices of boiled beef, very cold, very fat, and very tough. I know not whence the fat came; for in that country there are no cattle bred for the table, but only for the plough and the wagon, and after many years of labor they are killed, not because they are fit to be eaten, (quite the contrary) but because they can work no longer. The next dish promised better; it was a salmon twisted into a circle, with his tail in his mouth, like the allegorical images of eternity. But I am sure if I were to live, as the Americans say, from July to Eternity, I should not wish to look upon the like of such a fish again. It had been brought all the way from Carinthia by the bold Baron himself. I need not say more. And yet its bones were so nicely cleaned, that the skeleton might have been placed in a museum of natural history, and named by Agassiz or Deshayes without further trouble. Next arrived a dish of sausages which disappeared in what the Germans call an Augenblick or twinkling of an eye. Lastly, came the roast, as it always does in those countries, but instead of a jolly English surloin or haunch, the dish consisted of a small shred of what they facetiously called venison—but such venison! Yet had the original stag been alive from which this morsel was hewn, it could not have moved off faster. To wind up all, instead of dessert, we were presented with a soup-plate holding eleven