I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. What ought they to be in China. All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion.

In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Szekelys in the East and North. It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.) I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams.

Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a nobleman of that country. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.) I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams.

I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. They had all full 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, but of course there were petticoats under them. Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a nobleman of that country.