Down The Blue Danube

Heidelberg, Gennany, Sept. 4, '96. I wonder if you ever savv a Hungarian hog. He looks like a half empty meal sack as he listlessly suns himself in the historie mud of the Danube. He wears a bell, but rarely moves enough to ring it. He has a way of lining up his several selves upon the bank of the river and thus constructing a sort of scalloped border for our liorizon. There is a rather pleasing monotony about this part of the river. It is no longer bridged, not even by those swing bridges constructed like the Mohammedan bridge Al Serat, which leads to Paradise Islands, sometimes miles in length, and again clustered and confusingly numerous, make it hard to decide upon which channel to choose. But the Danube cnrrent itself is the Ariadne's thread which guides us out of all these labyrinths. Upon these islands we see so many huts of fishermen and the piscatorial artist himself paddling about in his clumsy craft. They have such varied arts for catching the unwary fish; trolling line, hook, line and pole, small scoop nets, large spoon nets, long nets, like a tennis net, round nets, which are attached to a long rope and thrown from the bank, and great yards netted in and stationary, into which they entice the fish at night by means of a flaring light. Some days the sun is hot, and Sancho arranges the blankets comfortably and succumbing to my suggestive quotation, "Sleep, Sancho, for thou wert born to sleep," passes a nionotonous hour in slumber. But every village or town breaks the sameness, and gives something new at which to marvel. As we approach we are saluted by a sound of battering quite suggestive of an assault on Troy. This proves to be long line of washerwomen standing hip deep in the water and slapping dirty clothes on a wooden stand. These dusky aphrodites, as they rise from the foam, which their efforts at cleanliness produces, are a very amusing sight. Once ashore we are surrounded, and some officious fellow, with a Germán education, is deputized to question us. We recite our story, and you would laugh to see my wife in her bloomer costume, standing araid a motley crowd of men, woinen and children dressed in every conceivable costume. Men in regular mother-hubbard gowns or else a linen frock and baggy linen trousers; women with red, yellow, or any gay headdress and othergarmeuts to match, and children whose dusky skins are not clothed enough to speak of, cluster about. I have in rny kodak a scène wherein j ïny wife stands beneath two brasa ( basiu ; a barber's sign in this country ; } and entertains, while I have gone to , buy some milk. The group consists of . eight or ten little darkskinned rascáis, , with a wee cotton shirt apiece, peasant women with short, gay, plaid skirts, very full, and adorned with green and blue ribbons, a yellow black and red kerchief on head, and purple embroidered kerchief about her neck; and men dressed as above described. The scène is what you might expect on the Congo, but hardly in central Europe. Everyone is very courteous to the "schone Frau" and many a luckless imp gets soundly cuffed by some respectful bystander for daring to get too close to the object of interest. These boys are black as Africans and have eyes like sloes. They are aniphibious, so sun and water accounts for their complexious. When I went after milk I was guided up a narrow lane bordered by little huts with thatched roofs. We carne at last to a hut larger than the rest and having a yard filled with dirty geese and hens. My guide opened the door and I saw the three old withered beldames sitting in a very smoky atmosphere, ■with some black pots before them, in which they were brewing some black, mysterious substance with a sickening smell. They seemed not at all anxious to sell milk and simply humped their backs a little more and scowled at me. The solicitations of my guide finally prevailed and one of them mumbled and crooned while she got the milk. After leaving this village we carne soon to a canal about flve miles in length, cutting off a lona loop, which the winding river makes at this point. Of all things melancholy, this canal is chief. Nothing but sand dunes on either s:de and cawing crows sitting upon the ridges while we passed. Tall, rustling reeds whispered unhappily and made it all seem dreary enough. There were ugly swirls in this canal, which twisted our little boat quite viciously. But we at last reached the noble river itself and drifted happily down to Mohacs. Before landing we passed a coal barge, which. was being loaded at the wharf by a gang of women with wheelbarrows. We had no sooner gone ashore than we carne upon a group of girls in gay dresses, who were singing merrily and carrying buckets of water, with whicb hey were niaking mortar for a new stone building. Not far up in the town we saw some young women carrying bricks up a ladder to some "lady masons," not members of the "Eastern Star," who were laying the bricks. I tried to get a picture of the brick carriers )ut they saw me, and ran away giggling. After we bad passed they re-urned and jabbered at us excitedly until we disappeared. Every tavern, which we passed, was filled with men gossiping over their beer. We decided hat the "new women" had complete xissession there or else that the town was getting out a "wonien's edition," so popular now-a-days. As we were departing we carne upon a pottery establishment. "Oh ye Tobosian urns." I thought I never should ;ear my better half away from thy charms, Asmodeus, the very demon of vanity possessed her, for she insisted that one of those lovely green jugs would look so well with our dishes. We finally escaped with the purchase of a loaf of bread, two and a half feet long and eight inches diameter. It is great fun to see the housewife circumnavigate these enormous loaves with my penknife. It was late in the afternoon, when a regular tornado sent us ashore giving us no time to choose our habitation. We landed (?) in a regular swamp. There was nothing but quicksand beneath us, but it saved us from being upset by the waves, which our boat could not have endured a moment. After a desperate struggle we got our tent up and drove out the mosquitoes, which came actually in clouds. The netting at one end was black with the pests. We were compelled, because the waves did not subside, to make an amphibious camp, half on quicksand, half on water. The mosquitoes howled like wolves all night, and in the morning Sancho insisted that she could see the tracks of their bedewed feet all over the tentcloth. More of our quixotic adventures next week. C. H. Van Tyne.