52 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



It would be out of place here to enter on a description of 

 domestic iife among the Hungarian upper classes, into which we 

 were so fortunate as to gain an insight. But it is diflScult to avoid 

 some allusion to the peasantry of the various races, Magyars, Russians, 

 Slavs, Wallachians, Galicians, Jews, and gipsies (Czigan), we met with. 

 A practised eye readily detects the differences between them, but even 

 the ordinary traveller soon learns to recognise the Russian in his 

 red cloth trowsers and embroidered jacket, his unmarried sister or 

 daughter wearing a wreath of artificial flowers. Also the Galician, 

 with his dark woollen Polish jacket, much embroidered and adorned 

 with orange-coloured tassels. But the people with whom we came 

 most in contact were the Wallachians, who, in the districts we 

 visited, do the greater part of the work in the forests, especially 

 that connected with the rafting and floating of timber. They are a 

 wild looking people, dressed, as a rule, in dirty white clothes, with 

 wide trowsers and coat sleeves, over which they wear a woollen 

 jacket, so rough that it has the appearance of sheep skin ; also a 

 very broad and stifi" leathern girdle, reaching from the hips more 

 than halfway to the arms, and drawn together in front with four 

 stout buckles. Their faces and the other exposed parts of their 

 bodies, are much sunburnt, their feet being bare or encased in cloth 

 or leather sandals ; and their long hair hangs unkempt about their 

 shoulders. They present, at first sight, a striking resemblance to 

 the wild tribesmen of the North- Western Indian frontier, and might 

 easily be mistaken for them, if it were not for the straw hats worn 

 by the men, and the skirts of the women. During the last few years, 

 there has been a formidable immigration of Jews into Hungary, 

 principally from Poland and the north ; and their treatment forms, at 

 the present time, a serious political question. They are by no 

 means popular in the country of their adoption, where we saw quite 

 enough of their forbidding countenances. 



The Magyar peasants adopt different dresses in various parts of 

 the country. But, as a rule, the men wear loose white trowsers, 

 such as are worn by Afghans ; and in the districts about Besztercze- 

 banya, the women wear a bright-coloured bodice, with short skirt, 

 and long leather boots reaching to the knee, their hair hanging in a 

 long thick plait down the back. 



The gipsies, when seen camping in their wretched wigwams by 

 the roadside, are not attractive objects, but they are born musicians ; 

 and the bands of them who frequent the hotels and promenades of 

 Buda-Pesth, playing the wild and beautiful Hungarian airs, are 



