These jugs, which are destined to hold wine (one for each guest) on the occasion of their baptismal, wedding, or funeral banquets, are from nine to eleven inches high, and have a metal lid attached to the handle. Every variety of coloring and pattern is to be found among them; sometimes it is an uncouth design of dancing or drunken peasants, sometimes a pair of stags, or a dog in pursuit of a hare, or else a basket filled with fruit, or raised medallions with sprigs of flowers in the centre.
My inquiries were usually met by the suspicious counter-questions, “Why do you want to buy our jugs? What are you going to do with them?” and the answer I gave, that I was fond of such old things, and that they would be hung up in my dining-room, was often received with evident disbelief.
These people are not easily induced to talk about themselves, and have little sense of humor or power of repartee. They have an instinctive distrust of whoever tries to draw them out, scenting in each superfluous question a member of a species they abhor—namely, “a chiel among them taking notes;” or, as the Saxon puts it, “one of those incomprehensible towns-folk, ever fretting and ferreting after our ways and customs, and who have no sensible reason for doing so either.”
SAXON EMBROIDERY AND POTTERY.
(This and the illustration on [p. 53] are from the collection of Saxon Antiquities in possession of Herr Emil Sigerus at Hermanstadt.)
Two analogous incidents which I met with, soon after my arrival in Transylvania, seemed to give me the respective clews to Saxon and Roumanian character. The first was in a Saxon peasant’s house, where I had just purchased two jugs and a plate, for which, being still a stranger in those parts, I had paid considerably more than they were worth, when on leaving the house the hostess put a small bunch of flowers into my hand. The nosegay was somewhat tumbled and faded, for this was Sunday afternoon, and probably the woman or her daughter had worn these flowers at church earlier in the day. In my ignorance of Saxon character I took this offering in the light of a courteous attention, and accepted the bouquet with a word of thanks.
My error did not last long, for as I stepped into the court-yard the wooden, Noah’s-ark faced woman hurried after me, and roughly snatching the nosegay out of my hand, she harshly exclaimed,
“I do not give my flowers for nothing! unless you pay me two kreuzers (a halfpenny), I shall keep them for myself!”