As the train from Vienna descends into the valley of the Drave a change becomes perceptible in the scattered cottages and hamlets that fly past us. The dark wooden chalets of the Semmering valleys, that recall Salzburg and Tyrol and more distant Scandinavia, give place to meaner huts, less roomy, lower, paler, more rectangular. Rich maroon-brown beams that seem to have grown up with the pines around, dark projecting eaves that overhang the time-stained fronts as the shadowy fir-branches the primeval trunks—all these give place to wattle and daub and chilling whitewash. The eaves are now less prominent; but if the houses are comparatively browless, there is a pair of window eyelets under the trilateral gable, and their physiognomy is recognised at once. These are the huts you have seen far away on the Sclavonic outskirts of Hungary. You have seen them dotted about Bohemia and the sandy plains of Prussia; you have seen them magnified and embellished into the old palaces of Prague. As we approach Marburg we are entering in truth on another world—a Sclavonic tongue begins to be heard around. Those mountain-chalets were the high water mark of the Germanic sea. For the tide has turned. Marburg, a few years ago reckoned a German town, is now almost entirely Slovenized. The tradesmen—nay, the well-to-do classes themselves—speak Slovene in preference to German. A fellow-traveller told me that since the Austro-Prussian war Slovene instead of German had become the language of the schools. Cut off from her German aspirations, the Austrian Government has seen the necessity of making friends with the Sclavonic Mammon; and, as she distrusts those members of the race who, like the Czechs and Croats, cherish memories of independent kingship, her statesmen have cast about them for a Sclavonic race free from any misguiding ‘Kronen-tradition,’ and have consequently been exalting the horn of the Slovenes, who inhabit Southern Styria and parts of Carinthia and Carniola, at the expense of the Germans of the towns, and partly even of the Carniolan Wends, whose language is akin to the Slovene. The painful impression produced by this turn of the tables on the Germans—who look on Austria as a mere warming-pan for themselves in Eastern Europe—is amusingly betrayed by a recent Prussian traveller, Maurer, who visited Marburg in 1870. ‘Another ten years,’ says he, ‘and Marburg will be as Slovenish as its immediate surroundings.... It was extremely painful to me (äusserst peinlich) to see the children at Steinbrück going to or coming from school with books in which the text and objects were Slovene; although these little ones, even the smallest of them, had our language at their fingers’-end so completely that they seemed never to have spoken any other.... We must not spare ourselves the realisation of the bitter truth that the greater part of Styria and Carinthia, and the whole of Carniola, Gorizia, Gradisca, and Istria, with the avenue to the Adriatic, are lost to us.