MUCH of that flavor of Rumanian life which brings the
country so frequently into the news is attributable to the
many richly unusual characters who speck the national
life. Even on a stage dominated by a Great Powers' struggle,
personalities still count, and events are as different as might
be expected with so different a cast.

"Cast" is an appropriate word here, for one always has
a slight sense of unreality in Rumania--of living in the midst
of a burlesque of rational life, though a burlesque in which
the characters are likely, for motives clearly apparent only
to them, to go suddenly dead serious and perpetrate a
tragedy in the midst of a farce. Thus an especial detachment
is required of the spectator to Rumanian affairs, an attitude
in which the ability to be amused as well as bemused is help-
ful in catching the true highlights--which accounts for
what might otherwise seem irreverently light references in
some of these pages on this extraordinarily Balkan Balkan
country. A single incident (to which one of the authors was
witness) serves remarkably well to epitomize such slightly
daffy proceedings.

As on almost every important occasion, on Rumanian
Unification Day--commemorating the nineteenth-century
joining of the two ancient Rumanian provinces as a united
kingdom--a considerable crowd gathered before the Royal
Palace on the great misshapen square in the middle of

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