all, the cymbal.  The tarogato looks like a grand piano with the top off.  It stands on four legs like a table and has wires drawn across it; on these wires the player performs with two little sticks, that are padded at the ends with cotton-wool.  The sound is wild and weird, but if well played very beautiful indeed.  The gipsies seldom compose music.  The songs come into life mostly on the spur of the moment.  In the olden days war-songs and long ballads were the most usual form of music.  The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were specially rich in the production of songs that live even now.  At that time the greatest gipsy musician was a woman:  her name was “Czinka Panna,” and she was called the Gipsy Queen.  With the change of times the songs are altered too, and now they are mostly lyric.  Csardas is the quick form of music, and tho’ of different melodies it must always be kept to the same rhythm.  This is not much sung to, but is the music for the national dance.  The peasants play on a little wooden flute which is called the “Tilinko,” or “Furulya,” and they know hundreds of sad folk-songs and lively Csardas.  While living their isolated lives in the great plains they compose many a beautiful song.

It is generally from the peasants and the musical country gentry that the gipsy gets his music.  He learns the songs after a single hearing, and plays them exactly according to the singer’s wish.  The Hungarian noble when singing with the gipsies is capable of giving the dark-faced boys every penny he has.  In this manner many a young nobleman has been ruined, and the gipsies make nothing of it, because they are just like their masters and “spend easily earned money easily,” as the saying goes.  Where there is much music there is much dancing.  Every Sunday afternoon after church the villages are lively with the sound of the gipsy band, and the young peasant boys and girls dance.

The Slovaks of the north play a kind of bagpipe, which reminds one of the Scotch ones; but the songs of the Slovak have got very much mixed with the Hungarian.  The Rumanian music is of a distinct type, but the dances all resemble the Csardas, with the difference that the quick figures in the Slav and Rumanian dances are much more grotesque and verging on acrobatism.

VII

AUSTRIA’S ADRIATIC PORTS

Trieste and Pola[3]

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN

Trieste stands forth as a rival of Venice, which has, in a low practical view of things, outstript her.  Italian zeal naturally cries for the recovery of a great city, once part of the old Italian kingdom, and whose speech is largely, perhaps chiefly, Italian to this day.  But, a cry of “Italia Irredenta,” however far it may go, must not go so far as this.  Trieste, a cosmopolitan city on a Slavonic shore, can not be called Italian in the same sense as the lands and towns so near Verona which yearn to be as Verona is.  Let Trieste be the rival, even the eyesore, of Venice, still Southern Germany must have a mouth.