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Our batterie de cuisine consisted of three spirit-lamps of different sizes and styles, a few plates and cups of white enamelled ironware, a tin kettle, coffee-pot, teapot, and water-can, knives, forks, spoons, and ladle. These necessary articles, together with the hatchet, a few tools and copper nails, medicines and general stores, we soon learned to distribute properly among the three canoes, and thus divide the weight and amicably share the trouble of transportation. It was astonishing how much the canoes would hold, and every time we unpacked them we always marvelled at their loading capacity. In addition to the outfit described we often had to carry fresh meat, vegetables, milk and wine, and a large store of burning spirits, to say nothing of a great many canned provisions. The limit seemed to be fixed only by the weight we were individually willing to struggle with.

Our experiments with the canoes in the inn-yard and the rearrangement of our luggage occupied us most of the whole afternoon of the long summer day, but we had daylight enough left in which to see the town and stroll through the extensive park with its lakes and its sociable swans, and to gaze from afar on the inhospitable looking palace of the Princes of Fürstenberg, who have arbitrarily declared for their own glorification that a large spring in their pleasure-grounds is the actual source of the Danube. They have surrounded the spring with expensive masonry, and erected a stone tablet with an inscription giving the information, among other things, that that spot is 678 metres above sea level and 2840 kilometres from the Black Sea by way of the Danube. The hotel where we stayed is at the southern end of the fine stone bridge connecting the two sections into which the Brigach divides the town. Conveniently near to the hotel is a large flight of stone steps leading down to the water, and here we proposed to launch the canoes early the next morning and make our start, a few yards above the source of the Danube, according to the prince’s tablet, and about 2000 yards above the junction of the Brigach and the Brege, where the stream is first christened the Danube.