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

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We naturally depended largely on the advice of the veteran cruiser of the party for the selection of our outfit, and we two novices had a consultation with him shortly after our expedition was decided upon. Knowing nothing about the canoes, we asked him what we should take along to make a bed with; whether we should carry an air-pillow or one of the small cork mattresses we had seen advertised for such trips.

“Dear me, no!” he said. “You don’t need any blanket. Sleep in your clothes!”

“But a pillow?” we urged.

“Just fold up your trousers for a pillow!”

“Then what do you cover yourself up with?”

“That’s simple enough. Pop your legs in the sleeves of your coat and your feet and ankles will be as warm as toast.”

“What about your shoulders?”

“Oh, well; haul any old thing over your shoulders. You’ll soon get used to that. The less you carry the better.”

This unique method of making one’s self comfortable for the night appealed more to our sense of humor than it did to the practical side of our nature, and we decided to carry a good thick woollen blanket, a rubber one of extra quality, a canvas boat-bag with a suit of shore-going clothes, a sleeping-suit, various spare flannels, socks, boating-shoes, and other small articles. This bag would make, if packed with that end in view, an excellent pillow; and we proposed to trust to our constitutional endurance to become indifferent to the hardness of the canoe floor. A bicycle cape, a sketching umbrella and camp-stool, together with a sketch-bag full of materials, practically completed the personal outfit of the majority of the party. Of all these articles we found the rubber ones alone to be of no real use. The bicycle cape shed water for a few minutes and then converted itself into a complicated system of gargoyles which conducted the drip into the most intimate recesses of our clothing, and soon made the canoe floor a perfect swamp. As for the expensive rubber blankets, they were a fetich for many weeks. The hours and hours we waited for those dew-dripping sheets to dry! The care we took of them lest they should get burned or torn, and prove worthless in the hour of need! The trouble we took to pack them by day and to cover them up at night lest they should gather all the moisture of the neighborhood and communicate it to our clothing! We never but once used them to shed the rain, and that was the third night of our expedition, but we conscientiously lugged them along with us the whole distance, and got only our bother for our pains. The sketching umbrellas and the camp-stools were, on the other hand, of the greatest use and a constant comfort. When it rained we sat at our ease on the stools and comfortably cooked and ate and smoked under the spreading expanse of white linen. When a shower overtook us on the water we often hoisted the umbrellas and drifted along as sheltered and as dry as could be.