The spot in question--half-way between Colomea, the hill-crowned capital of the district, and Zablotow, a poor Jewish townlet of the plain--is within the parish boundary of Zulawce, a village not, however, visible from the railway, its cottages, a couple of miles beyond, covering an eastern slope of the magnificent mountain range. The thatched dwellings are as poor as anywhere in that part of Galicia, not even the church or the manor house commanding any attention. But all the more charming is the neighbourhood. Approaching the village from the Pruth, you reach its first outlying cottages without the effort of climbing, but by the time you have ascended to the farthermost dwellings you have a splendid lowland landscape at your feet--spreading fields of gold, verdant woods and heath-covered tracts, skirted by the Pruth as with a broad silver ribbon, the glittering rivulet of the Czerniawa winding between. And your eye will carry you farther still, to the natural horizon, northward. But the eastern view is altogether different, and incomparably bewitching, the gloriously wooded hill-country of the Bukowina rising gradually, terrace upon terrace, from the deep-sunk valley of the Czeremosz. Indeed, this prospect, as seen from the village, is wondrously grand, a succession of gigantic steps, as it were, leading from earth toward heaven, the highest mountain-tops melting away in the ethereal blue. To the west and south the view is bounded by the "Welyki Lys," a gigantic mountain forest which separates Galicia from Hungary--dark and dreary, and unutterably monotonous. Nowhere in the lower Carpathians is there a spot to equal Zulawce for Nature's variety, looking upon the village as a centre.
But this is not all for which the place is noteworthy. Life there, on the whole, is regulated after the ways of the lowlands; but the people themselves approach the Huzul type--a peculiar race, inhabiting the mountains, and which, on account of the common language, is generally classed with the Ruthens, but being of a different origin and of different conditions of life is distinct from them, as in appearance so in habit and in character. The Huzul is a hybrid, uniting the Slavonic blood of the Ruthen with the Mongolian blood of the Uzen, his speech betraying the former while his name testifies to the latter; so also does the defiant dauntlessness of his bearing, hidden beneath an appearance of proud restraint, but apt to burst out suddenly, like a hot spring through the covering snow. The Ruthens of the lowlands, on the contrary, are purely Slavonic; industrious therefore, enduring and very patient, not easily roused, but once the fire is kindled it will go on burning with a steady glow. These virtues, however, have sad vices for a reverse--a bluntness which is both dull and coarse, and an abject humility, bending the neck of the conquered man even lower than need be. An unfair load of hardships may be pleaded in their excuse. The Ruthen for centuries bore the chains of serfdom, and these broken he continued the subject of some Polish nobleman, no law protecting his body, still less his goods, no mental culture reaching him whose soul received the barest crumbs of spiritual teaching. In this respect things, to be sure, went as ill with the Huzuls, but for the rest theirs was a life of liberty on the mountains, acknowledging no nobleman and no officer of the crown. Poorly enough they lived in the forest wilds, their sheep yielding milk and cheese, the barren soil a few oats for scarcely eatable bread, while meat was within reach of him only who would stake his own life in killing a bear. To this day there are glens where no money has ever been seen; for which reason it has never been thought worth while to levy taxes, the great lords remaining in the lowlands where the soil was fruitful and he who tilled it a slave. "Within those mountains there are but bears to be found and a wild people called Uzels," thus wrote a German explorer in the seventeenth century. He might have written it yesterday, for with the bear only does the Huzul share the sovereignty of the mountains, and his very freedom is no better than the liberty of the bear--yet liberty it is! Thus the difference between the Ruthens of the uplands and the Ruthens of the plain is immense, and scarcely to be bridged over--free huntsmen up yonder, yoke-bearing bondmen below.