to give you anything except the most apparently truthful evidence I can pick up by the wayside, and the observations of my own eyes, and certainly the latter have not been favourable to Hungary in any way, though they look certainly very like a fighting race, these Magyars. The railroad from Pesth to Basiash, where one embarks on the Danube, passes through enormous flats, heavy for miles and miles with maize and other crops, and very thinly peopled. It is a constant wonder where the people can come from to reap and garner it all. The great fault of the country is the dust, which is an abominable nuisance. Certainly the facilities for travelling are getting to be all that can be wished in our time. A little more than forty-eight hours will bring a man, who can stand night journeys, to Vienna; after resting a night, eighteen hours more will bring him to Basiash, where he will at once plunge into the old world of turbans and veiled women, minarets and mosques; man and beast and bird, houses and habits, all strange and new to him; and if the Danube fares were not atrociously high, there are few things I would more earnestly recommend to my holiday-making countrymen than a trip down that noblest, of European rivers. Considering the present state of political matters, too, in the world, he can hardly select a more interesting country. Certainly the Eastern question gains wonderfully in interest when one has seen ever so little of the lands and people about which the wisest heads of all the wisest statesmen of our day are speculating and scheming--not very wisely, I fear, at present. The Danube, 13th September 1862.