Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 2, 1851).djvu/194

or hawking, why should I not speak of them? For the abundance is so great in Hungary, that it is considered as a very offensive thing to forbid the peasantry either to hunt or hawk; and the common people have scarcely inferior banquets to those of the nobility, as regards hares, fallow deer, stags, wild boars, thrushes, partridges, pheasants, aurochsen, and everything of the same kind which elsewhere is coveted for more refined tables. Cattle indeed is so abundant, that you might well wonder whence came such numbers of large herds of oxen, and flocks of sheep, as are exported into foreign countries, such as Italy, Germany, and Bohemia. For while there are many roads lying open through Moravia, Austria, Styria, Sclavonia, and other provinces bordering upon Hungary, through which cattle can be driven in herds from this country, it has been noticed that by one of them alone, namely, the Vienna road, more than eighty thousand oxen have been driven in one year into Germany.

And now what shall I say as to the abundance of fish of all kinds? So great is it, not only in the Danube, the Drave, the Save, and all the smaller rivers, but also in the Theiss, which runs from the north-east nearly through the heart of Hungary, that fish is sold at the very lowest price, and is all but given away; and, indeed, is often not taken away unless given for nothing. Nor is the abundance alone of such wealth in Hungary a thing almost incredible; but their superiority is such, that provisions of the same kind produced in other countries cannot be placed in comparison with them. So much the more marked and melancholy will be the remembrance of this generation amongst posterity, that it did not devote all its energies to the preservation of a kingdom so wealthy, and so aptly placed for the subduing of the greatest enemy of the Christian name.