Читать книгу The Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea онлайн

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A HAYMAKER

indulging in the exhilarating prospect of explorations in the fascinating field of philology, and looking forward with no little interest to revisiting under the pleasantest of auspices old friends and familiar scenes. We agreed to meet at Donaueschingen on June 22d, and made all our arrangements to have the canoes reach that point on or previous to that date. The experience of old travellers with canoes was all against the successful consummation of this plan, particularly as two of the boats had to be shipped from New York, and would not be finished until the 3d of the month. The fate of the other canoe was more or less certain, for the owner decided to watch it himself all the way from London to the place of meeting, having learned after many disappointments that this process of transportation, although irksome, was the only one he could depend upon. On the evening of Saturday, June 20th, two of us left London in the wake of the Admiral of the fleet, who had paddled his canoe down the Thames to the Flushing boat some days before. Thirty-six hours later, on the morning of the 22d, refreshed and cheered by the brisk air of the mountains after two feverish nights on the journey, we saw between the showers of rain the brilliant sunlight sparkling on a tiny mountain brook near the little hamlet of Sommerau, on the eastern slope of the water-shed. Although we had no map or guide-book, we knew at once that our acquaintance with the Danube had begun. The long-dormant sporting corpuscles in our blood took on a sudden and stimulating activity, and we were in a nervous quiver to begin our long-dreamed-of cruise. The Rhine had failed to charm us with its majestic scenery; we had seen only the hideous scars that modern man has made on the fair face of nature there, with villas of carpenter’s Gothic and summer hotels of repulsively mammoth proportions. Cologne, Mayence, Strasburg, which, under ordinary circumstances, would have been joys to us, had been on this journey aggravating impediments in the way of our progress, for all the trains had seemed to combine viciously to break connections at these points and to force us to delay our eager flight. The charms of architecture and art, although always potent, had been but a meagre consolation to us in our impatience to begin our intimate communion with Nature. Even the wonderful railway journey over the pass, while it had put us in a better mood and temporarily stirred our emotions, had not given us a tithe of the sensation that the sparkle of the rivulet caused as we caught sight of it after a great gray curtain of rain had been driven away by an all-powerful flood of sunlight.