you had not the haziest notion, and whose very name you do not know when you hear it, waking at the cessation of the horses' gallop and the gipsey Jehu's shouts, to open your eyes upon the clear Moldavian or Wallachian night, with the sound of music from some open casement above. Regions such as these are the Principalities, and who would not keep them so, from the Danube to the Dneister, from the Straits of Otranto to the Euxine, for the refuge of necessitous wanderers who have an inconvenient connection, a tiresome run upon them from the public, or a simple desire for a paradise where a woman will not follow them, where letters will not come, where the game districts are unbeaten, and the deep woods and wild valleys as yet unsketched and unsung?
Through the Principalities, Erceldoune travelled in as brief a time, from the early dawn when he had left Paris, as mail trains, express specials, rapid relays of horses, and swift river passages could take him, across Tyrol and Venetia, Alps and Carpethians, Danube and Drave, calling at Belgrade with despatches, and pushing straight on for Moldavia. Every mile of that wild and unworn way was as familiar to the Queen's Messenger as the journey between London and Paris is familiar to other men.
