he is only stating what we knew by actual experience to be still true. It is not so soon forgotten—that chilly night, when, for want of a single hospitable roof in a whole village to shelter midnight travellers, we were fain to stall ourselves in the creepiest of church porches—and had we not sundry other reminiscences of slammed doors and long parleyings to boot in the moonlight of the Julians? There was always something morose in the temperament of those Slovenes; something too much in harmony with the prevailing black of the Upper-Carinthian costume, with the sad weirdness of their music—what a dirge it was that accompanied our way to that ghostliest of shelters! The Granitza folk, on the contrary, are light in heart as in garment; sociable, hospitable; finding their poetic portraiture rather among those Acadians of whom it is written that Neither locks had they to their doors, nor bars to their windows, But their dwellings were open as day and the hearts of their owners. Is it that these Croats of the Marches still retain the old Sclavonic communism, which the Wends and Slovenes have lost? It is most delightful, too, to come upon a place where ‘charity’ in its mischievous, oriental form, is kept from the door. Here every community is of its very essence a kind of benefit club; the common homestead is the only asylum for the old, infirmary for the sick; in times of war it was not the least important advantage of the Military Frontier, that each house-community formed a hospital for disabled soldier house-brothers. The communal system prevents moreover the rise of an actual proletariate; the flunkeyism of service is absent where all are alike fellow-helps and fellow-masters; and no doubt if a brother be disproportionately lazy, moral suasion of an unmistakable kind is brought to bear on him by the rest of the community. Here we have a kind of industrial police organisation. Endued with all this brotherly co-operation, these social advantages and virtues, Granitza life cannot be said to be without its brighter aspects; but alas that it should have shadow as well as sunshine! After all we must own that those earnest staid Slovenes, likened by the German to his Mecklenburgers and Nether-Saxons, possess, with all their moroseness, a more solid civilization. It was admitted to us here—who, indeed, could not see it?—that education was far behind-hand, and the children unkempt and neglected; indeed, the mortality among Granitza infants is said to be outrageous. Why, indeed, should they be better cared for? Why in the name of Fortune should the celibate portion of the community be mulcted for the sake of philoprogenitive brothers? Agriculture here is at a standstill, and the fields undunged.