Even supposing the whole of Southern Germany to have been fused with Northern, and the German element in Austria either under compulsion or of its free will to have followed the already torn away Bohemia and Moravia’—(the Berliner looks on the annexation of the Czech kingdom as a mere work of time)—‘even then we should have neither the might nor the right—though it matters less about the right (!)—to break forcibly through Illyria to the Adriatic. And yet our dreaminess and disregard of the facts before us made us look on Trieste and these former lands of the German Bund as our inheritance.’[145]—These poor Prussians! But the Slovenes are left behind—as the train hurries along the willowed valley of the Save we find ourselves among a population less European in its dress, and soon arrive at Agram, the capital of Croatia, where we discover a fair hotel in the High Street. The aspect of the town at once strikes the stranger as other than German. What are these long, low, rectangular houses but slightly enlarged reproductions of the Sclavonic cottage? Here is the same pervading pallor, the twin eyelet windows, circular here, and pierced in the trilateral gables like owl-holes in an old barn. The gables themselves—more modest than the generality of those in Teutonic towns—seem to shrink from facing the street. Outside some of the older houses is to be seen a wooden gallery, festooned perhaps with flowers and creepers, on to which the room-doors open—it strikes one as an approach to the Turkish verandah, the Divanhané. The headings over the shops are almost entirely Sclavonic. Brilliant, quite Oriental, are the stores where the gay Croatian costumes are hung out to tempt the passing peasant. Picturesque are the windows, shut in by foliated bars and gratings of efflorescent ironwork; strange, too, the doors and shutters, crossed diagonally by iron bars of really artistic merit, decked at the point of intersection by a heraldic rose, and the limbs of the Maltese cross terminating in graceful fleurs-de-lys. Not that the object of all these is primarily ornament. These quadruple bolts and locks, these massive hinges and the holdfasts by them inside, which fit into sockets as in our safes, and so prevent the door from being burst open by hacking through the hinges from without—all these tell a different story. They speak of times when the streets of Agram were not so secure as at present. [Illustration: Croatian Clothes-shop, Agram.]