One pleasant afternoon in October, when the sun shed its mellow rays on the grey walls of Vienna, tinging the lofty spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral with golden light, and burnishing the faded foliage of the venerable trees in the delightful park of Austria’s capital, I hurried to the banks of the beautiful blue Danube, which Strauss has made famous through the music loving world by the dedication of one of his most charming waltzes. My prosaic object, amid so many poetical surroundings, was to take the evening boat to Presburg. After the customary wrangle with the hackman, I passed the gang-plank and stood among plump “fraus” and “frauleins” with keen black eyes, set above rosy cheeks, beneath an abundance of luxuriant hair of raven hue. Austrian peasants were there with coats of coarse cloth like our once famous “butternut” and Hungarian peasants were there with coats of sheep-skin. Languages mingled, as did the speakers, but the Austrian voices were in the majority, quite as much as were the owners thereof. The Austrian is more loquacious than the Hungarian; the latter has a calm dignity about him, reminding one of the Orient, and he is more economic in his use of words—possibly for the reason that it is no easy matter to speak his language even when one is born to it. Immediately below Vienna the Danube runs through a broad plain that offers nothing of special interest, unless it be the spot where in 1809 Napoleon built a bridge by which his army crossed the river on the night of the fourth of July, to fight on the fifth the battle of Wagram, which cost the Austrians twenty-six thousand men and led to the treaty of Vienna in October of the same year. As we look towards the east the horizon is everywhere limited by mountains; and as we approach them we discover a change in the character of the country. The plain disappears and is succeeded by hills. On the first of these, on the right bank, is the picturesque town of Hainburg, with its ruined chateau dating from the middle ages, and also a well built one of more modern days.
If we are smokers we should take a second look at Hainburg, for here is the imperial factory employing two thousand persons in the manufacture of cigars. Tobacco in Austria is a government monopoly; cigars are made by the government and sold to the retail dealers at a discount of five per cent., and this is the only profit allowed. Whether you, as a smoker, buy one cigar, five cigars, five hundred or five thousand, you pay the same price per stuck, and there is no choice as to shops, so far as quality is concerned. Whether you buy in the Graben or the Taberstrasse of Vienna, or in an obscure shop in an obscure village a hundred miles from the capitol, you get the same quality of cigar for five, seven, nine, ten, or twelve kreutzers, in the one place as in the other. All come from one factory, and their goodness or badness never varies.
A little below Hainburg we pass the mouth of the river March, which separates Austria from Hungary. It is not a large stream, barely wide enough at this season of the year to be called a brook, but it is not always thus. The March is sometimes very deep and strong, and it has puzzled many a military commander how to cross it. During the various wars between Austria and Hungary several battles were fought on the banks of this river, some of them of a very sanguinary character. But all is quiet now, and the only demonstration witnessed during our voyage was that some of the Hungarian passengers raised their hats as the boat passed the March, and one of them took the trouble to inform me of the political importance of the locality, saying that he had served in the last war between the kingdom and the empire.
We wind among hills, some of them steep and rugged, and one crowned by a ruined fortress which once guarded the frontier and kept watch over the river. We see the old castle of Presburg, standing out against the evening sky; and it is dusk when we pass the bridge of boats which has been opened for our descent, and the boat swings round to the landing place at the ancient capital of Hungary. No wonder Austria and Hungary were always at each other’s ears when their capitals were only forty miles apart.‘Tis distance lends enchantment and preserves peace and harmony.
Our indefatigable consul at Vienna, General Post, had given me a letter of introduction to the prince of wine-growers at Presburg, Herr Palaguay; and as the Herr kept a hotel in addition to his wine business, the pair of us—an American naval captain and myself—sought that establishment without delay. We ordered dinner as it was late and we were hungry; the excellence of the pheasant, venison, beef, and other good things that were set before us, caused us to eat abundantly and to entertain a good opinion of the edible resources of Hungary. If we lived thus at the gateway what should we not find in traversing the kingdom? If it were only to secure a supply of Hungarian pheasants, Austria would be justified, in the mind of a gourmet, in the subjugation and appropriation of the entire land of Kossuth. What are national rights against a well-supplied dinner table?
We devoted the evening to a visit to the spacious wine cellars of our host. Very spacious they were; and we wandered about for two hours among huge casks, some of them containing three thousand five hundred gallons each, and worthy of being converted into tenement houses. We tasted of Tokay Imperial and Tokay Royal, of Chateau Presburg, Blood of Hungary, and I don’t know what else; and finally we grew weary of tasting and went home. It was from these cellars that the imperial cellar of Maximilian I., the ill-fated Emperor of Mexico, was stocked, and we were shown through the place by the younger Palaguay, who went to Mexico with Maximilian and arranged his wine vaults in the city of the Aztecs. Father and son were warm admirers of the adventurous scion of the House of Hapsburg, and the old gentleman never wearied of telling us about Kaiser Max and his good qualities.
Next day we climbed to the old chateau that overlooks Pres-burg, and from the esplanade in front had a beautiful view of the city and its surroundings. Beneath us lay Presburg, venerable and grey, with its cathedral, six centuries old, and its Hotel de Ville, dating from the fourteenth century. Directly at our feet was the Jews-quarter. There are seven thousand Jews here in a population of less than fifty thousand; and there is more dirt and general uncleanliness in their quarter than in all the rest of Presburg. West of us the hills shut out the view of Vienna. North were the vine-clad ridges whence come the wines of Presburg. And to the south and east were plain, field and forest; and showing a broad, winding belt of silver, the course of the Danube.