All day long we seemed to dawdle through the country. This was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills looking like those we see in old books. Sometimes the train ran by rivers and streams. From the wide stony banks on each side, it seems that there are great floods here. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear.

At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some of these people were just like the peasants at home or those I saw when I went through France and Germany. These had short jackets, round hats, and home-made trousers; but some others were very picturesque.

The women looked pretty, but their clothes looked very uncomforatble about the waist. They all had white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, and of course there were petticoats under them.

The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, and white linen shirts. They have enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all decorated with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches.

Vocabulary:

Dawdle: Go slowly and lazily
Attire: Clothing
Picturesque: Interesting and colourful
Flutter: Move quickly backward and forward in the air
Baggy: Very loose clothing
Dirty-white: A yellowish-white colour
Linen: A kind of cloth
Brass: A shiny gold metal