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

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The quaintest and strangest of costumes met our eyes as we leaned out of the window of our compartment when the train stopped at the station of St. Georgen, eager to see how the brook had widened there. The hurrying peasant women, in queer skull-caps with immense ribbon bows, stiff bodices, and short petticoats, seemed to be the supernumeraries in the prologue of an exciting, drama now about to begin. The train rolled slowly on with that peculiar settling-down motion that denotes a descending grade, and we watched the yard-wide brook gradually expand its channel and assume the proportions of a goodly stream. In the fertile valley near Villingen, where the country opens out

DONAUESCHINGEN GIRLS

and the landscape becomes more extensive, the stream was now fully a half-dozen yards wide, and the recent heavy rains had filled it nearly to overflowing with a yellow flood. We had a sudden and strong temptation to stop and begin our cruise at this point, but the uncertainty of the fate of our canoes, of which we had received no item of information since they had been shipped at New York, made it imperative for us to push on to Donaueschingen, and our ambition to make the highest start on record in the Danube annals was forever crushed by the considerations of transportation. Donaueschingen was still dripping from a heavy shower when we arrived about noon-time, but the eloquently beaming face of our companion would have dispelled the gloom of the heaviest thunder-storm, and we heeded not the weather, for we understood at once that the canoes had arrived and were all right. Indeed, contrary to all precedent and all prophecy, they had turned up safe and sound the day before; and when we saw them for the first time, all sleek and shiny and dainty, resting on the flag-stones of the inn-yard as lightly as bubbles on a pool of water, we felt that kind and quality of elation that had been a stranger to us since the first happy day of school vacation. Graceful as violins, with sails whiter than the fresh whitewash of the tidy hostlery, with shining nickel fittings and every detail highly finished, they combined in their construction beauty and strength in a near approach to perfection.