The train reached the frontiers of Austria in the afternoon of October 25 and that evening, Vienna, where-after the splendid disembarkment of two archdukes, who were met by a guard of officers "in laced uniforms" and soldiers "with feathered caps"-Swamiji's party was allowed to alight. Their luggage was searched For tobacco (a procedure gone through at every border and, presumably, at any point of destination); they paid whatever duty was charged and took a waiting carriage to a hotel, where reservations had been made in advance. (The Loysons did not stop over in Vienna but went straight through to Constantinople.)

On the evening of the twenty-fifth the party reached Vienna.

On the evening of October 28, the party again boarded the Orient Express and traveled for two nights and a day through the Balkan countries to Constantinople. The train stopped for a time, allowing the passengers to alight, in various cities along the way, such as Budapest, which Swamiji found "very neat and beautiful," and Belgrade. But for the most part, sight¬seeing was done from the train windows. The ragged, mud-hut poverty of the Balkan countryside reminded Swamiji of India-though in some respects he found it worse. "As they are Christians," he wrote, "they must have a number of hogs; and a single hog will make a place more dirty than two hundred barbarous men will be able to do. Yet this poverty was worth the freedom it was paying for. "Freedom with but one meal a day and tattered rags on, is a million times better than slavery in gold chains. A slave suffers the miseries of hell both here and hereafter. It was clear to Swamiji, however, that the precious, hard-won and costly freedom of the Balkan countries was to be short-lived. "After much bloodshed," he wrote of Serbia and Bulgaria, "they have thrown off the yoke of Turkey; but along with this they have got a serious disadvan¬tage-they must construct their army after the European model, otherwise the existence of not one of them is safe for a day. Of course, sooner or later they will all one day be absorbed by Russia.