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must be a fishing-rod) with such stern yet tender care; and nobody but an Englishman could consult his red guide-book regarding the beauties of the lower Danube, when he might be looking at the beauties themselves. No wonder he is conspicuous when compared with the figures around him, just as any one of those figures would be conspicuous anywhere else,-hook-nosed Jewish merchants, fiery-eyed Hungarians, straight-featured Greeks, white-cloaked Circassians with their long guns slung on their shoulders, a ragged but inexpressibly serene Turk smoking his chibouk under an improvisé tent of carpets, and keeping an eye upon the harem with which he is travelling. The modest allowance of wives he has found good to take with him are, for the greater safety of the sengers' morals, dressed, or rather smothered, in coarse linen sacks, in which a few slits are cut in order to supply the necessary amount of oxygen, and leaving a passage for the small and fragrantly steaming coffee-cup which repeatedly finds its way to their invisible lips. There is the sound of a plaintive fiddle coming from a corner of the deck, where a gipsy player is plying his bow. Here on the ground lies a bundle, the personal luggage of that fat Greek merchant, who calls it his travelling-rug, and probably considers it a rather shabby rug, but which, in virtue of its fleecy texture and blue-green shades, would create a furor in any English drawingroom. All over the deck there are touches of colour, and slight but unmistakable revelations of habits, which make you wonder whether you are still in Europe. There are amber mouthpieces to long pipes, strings of coral on a woman's neck, sheepskin fur on a peasant's back, as many turbans and fezes as hats and bonnets. At one end of the

deck a perfect hillock of brilliant pillows is stocked, the property of some provident family changing quarters. Behind this brilliant mountain sits ensconced the middleaged Englishman aforenamed.

The captain of the steamer, walking hurriedly to the front for the purpose of superintending the steering at a dangerous turn of the river, has to pass between the pillows and the Englishman. The Englishman looks up from his guide-book, and asks in very bad German, "Where is the rock they call Babakei?"

The captain, besides being in a hurry, is rather short-tempered, and explains impatiently that Babakei has been passed some time ago—a tall bare stone standing by itself in the water-a very nasty point to pass at night. There is a legend about it, too.

Yes, the Englishman knows all about the legend of the pretty Turkish woman, carried off by an audacious Hungarian, and being recaptured, left exposed on the rock in the river, while her captors, sailing off, called back mockingly, "Babakei!"-that is, "Repent." The Englishman knows all this, but he has unfortunately missed seeing the stone while he was occupied in reading about it.

The captain passes on, and the Englishman resumes his reading, being so much engrossed in a description of the Danube cataracts and the perils attendant on their passage, that he scarcely notices a slight swaying in the movement of the steamer. Having completely mastered the subject, he looks up again, and sees the captain returning the same way he came, only in a more leisurely manner, with his hands in his pockets.

The Englishman asks politely whether the captain will kindly point out the cataracts.

"Just got out of them, thank heaven!" says the captain, with less temper this time; "and very nasty they were to-day-have not seen them so rapid for long. It will be all plain sailing after this."

The Englishman is much distressed at having missed the cataracts, and expresses his regret in worse German than he used before. "We were just getting into the thick of them," says the captain, "at the time you asked me about Babakei."

"And Trajan's Road, which they tell me is about here?"

It appears that the beginning of Trajan's Road has just been missed while the Englishman has been inquiring after the cataracts. After this he comes to the conclusion that it would be better to read the descriptions in the guide-book later, and to look about him in the meantime.

And now it requires all his British calmness to suppress a long-drawn "Ah!" of wonder, so sudden and so vivid is the revelation of the scene around him.

Here is Servia on one side and Hungary on the other; straight cliffs with craggy ledges high up, their points and hollows almost out of eyesight, their sharp-cut sides streaked with broad veins of red-stone. Then, in ever-recurring succession, wooded slopes, which slant down to the water's edge, opening now and then to reveal the glimpse of a narrow creek winding off into a valley, steep-sided, and all clothed with young beech and clustering hazel-nut bushes.

On the Hungarian side there is but little life now and then, at long intervals, a mass of white with a steeple, which means a village; now and then something alive moving along the road, which means a cart; here and there a

speck at the water's edge, which means a human being. On the Servian side there is less life still. No villages here, not even single houses; nothing in the way of a human habitation, except lonely watch-towers planted on the hills, with wide intervals between; and more rarely still, a fisherman's hut, where the sun catches the light on the wet nets hung out to dry, and where large pieces of roughly cured fish are stuck about upon wooden stakes, bearing at this distance a ghastly resemblance to the heads of murdered men.

With one hand on his fishingrod and the other on the brim of his flapping wide-awake, the Englishman stood and gazed at the shifting scene; at the woods where the lowest trees dipped their branches in the water, and where the highest rocks seemed to run their heads against the very door of heaven; at the bold outline of some protruding cliff, and at the lonely peaks, so far above, which the wild birds of prey have all to themselves. A few days ago he had believed that there could not be anything more beautiful than the Rhine; but now, as he recalls the trim vineyards, the wellperched ruins (whether real or artificial) smiling down with such perfect self-satisfaction at their own images in the water, at the life and the brightness of picturesque peasants at work, tying up graceful vine tendrils, it all seems prettily weak, amiably conventional, beside this rugged and wild loneliness of the Danube. The endless change which feeds the eye there, the constant succession of neatly framed pictures, falls flat beside the grand monotony here, where each towering rock is like the other, yet each beautiful, and where you only see, perchance, some dark-faced oriental frowning

at you with sullen brow from under his faded turban.

Not one of these things had escaped the eyes of Gretchen Mohr; she had studied the cataracts, passed judgment on Trajan's Road, catalogued the fishermen, and registered the eagles. But now she was weary of them all, and it was with a heartfelt "At last!" that she greeted the sight of the pier. At last the end of their week-long wanderings was approaching. Tortuous are the paths, and questionable the conveyances, by which alone the Hercules Baths can be reached. The Mohrs had spent quite as much time in waiting-rooms as in railway carriages; had shivered on piers quite as often as they had been suffocated in cabins; they had slept in dirty inns, and had lived on strange and unknown food, had been cheated by railway officials and misguided by railway guides, until Gretchen had begun to think that the Hercules Baths were a myth.

The pier was as crowded and as lively as the steamer itself. A great number of men and boys, scantily dressed in dirty linen, wearing leather belts which almost reached their arm-pits, their feet curiously swaddled in checked flannel rags, stood grouped at the edge their savage appearance and ferocious glances were not calculated to reassure an ignorant passenger, who might well be excused if he thought himself in presence of one of the wild robber-bands of this mountain country.

The moment of landing was one of inextricable confusion. The Englishman appeared disturbed in his mind. He asked the person next him whether the "Iron Gates" have been passed or not, and was told that they lay farther down.

"You will see them in your book," said a young Hungarian, jocosely.

The Englishman was not in a humour for jests. He had quickly given up the idea of the Iron Gates, and in very good English was requesting everybody not to press against his fishing-rod, exclaiming at the same time that it was a rod of Farlow's make.

The savage half-naked men and boys suddenly disclosed themselves as porters, by seizing upon every available article of luggage and rushing off headlong in various directions, regardless of proprietorship, the great object apparently being to disperse the portmanteaus and boxes with the least possible delay. The mountain of pillows on deck was levelled with magical rapidity; the Englishman's fishing-rod was wrenched out of his hand and carried away in triumph through the crowd. There was an interval of uproarious confusion, of jostling and bustling-of hand-to-hand fighting with the porters, and unsuccessful bargaining with the drivers, and then at last the Mohrs found themselves on their way up the valley, while the confusion of tongues behind them grew fainter every moment.

Here there was peaceful green on all sides, and a giant vegetation bordering the very edge of the road. The Djernis river rushed along with much splashing and frothing and musical murmur. Now the road hung over it, and the travellers could plunge their eyes straight into its pools and eddies; now the river was far off, apparently just winding out of sight-but it was always there, a running accompaniment to the drive. Gretchen stared and stared about her,—at the steep hillsides, at the scraps

The valley was quite silent, except for the bells on the harness of their small team, and the everlasting rushing of the Djernis. At every turn they seemed to be leaving all signs of human life farther and farther behind them; only at long intervals a solitary peasant-woman would trudge past them, with coins glittering on her neck, her red-fringe apron giving her the appearance of some wandering flower of tropical size and brilliancy.

They had been driving for three hours, but the sun was not yet set; for the mountain-tops still bore a yellow flush, though down in the deep valley the air was chill with the breath of evening.

Was it in this wilderness that they were seeking the Hercules Baths? Would not the everdeepening and ever - narrowing valley close at last before them and block their passage?

Three or four gigantic white buildings loomed chill and monstrous through the dusk. Any European capital might have been proud of possessing them. How, then, had these giants of civilisation been dropped into this wild valley? The rampart of the hills rose straight behind them, and below, a fountain splashed, and the stone Hercules leant motionless on his club.

"The Hercules Baths at last!" said Adalbert, with a sigh of mingled bitterness and hope. The bitterness was for the past, the hope was for the future. When last he had looked upon these mountains he had had both youth and strength.

The Waters of Hercules, which have cured so many crippled men, why should they not give back to him some of his lost strength? but his lost youth nothing can evermore restore.

We

WE have had of late to lament the loss of several of our best entertainers in the realm of fiction. Two of the most notable of those to whom, for many years, we have been indebted for wholesome amusement and good company, have gone from us almost together. Anthony Trollope had scarcely done telling that story of his own honest life, which was, in part at least, more interesting than that of any of his heroes, when Charles Reade, whose hand upon the lyre was more fiery and often more potent, departed after him into the country where all is silent to our ears. have not wept for either of them as they deserved, especially not for the last the eccentric, the wayward, the combative-whose great gifts and admirable easy power and fine creative genius we have enjoyed and forgotten with an ingratitude happily not always characteristic of humanity. For there is good luck and ill luck in the matter of reputation, as well as in other chances of mankind. These two brethren have gone, and it is impossible to deny that we have fallen upon a lower level in the art which they practised so long and so well. With a few exceptions, which the reader, as he pleases, will make for himself, we have but a very secondrate circle of story-tellers: which, to people who are sometimes sick and sometimes sorry, and often tired and out of sorts, is a great deprivation. We do not perhaps entertain the elevated ideas concerning fiction as an art which have lately been put forth by Mr Besant, but we do not think it can be overestimated as one of the alleviations of life. He who can obtain for us in the midst of

our cares half a day's, nay, half an hour's, oblivion of them, and who can introduce us in times of solitude to excellent company-to men and women more characteristic perhaps than any we are likely to meet with in the flesh-is a public benefactor of no small importance. If, as is very likely, Mr Besant is right in saying that the story-teller has but small social importance, that, we are aware, is an injury which he shares with the highest of teachers, and which is not likely to do him much harm. Those who secure more glory than falls to his share, the actor, for instance, who has at the present lucky moment, at least for that craft, an enormous advantage over the romancer-for what reason that is reasonable it would be difficult to tell,-has probably a larger price to pay for it. But if the story-teller is little regarded, the story is despised by none, at least by no one who is worth counting. Though we are told by certain fine artists, chiefly American, that all the stories are told, we are as little disposed to believe these gentlemen, who go on telling stories all the same, as we were to believe the late Dr Cumming when he announced that the world was coming to an end, yet renewed the lease of the house which, if he was right, must have been fated to tumble about his ears long before he had got his money's worth. there is anything that could permanently alarm us for the art, it would be the note-book which Mr Besant recommends, in which his students of fiction are to take down whatever strikes them of the humours of society. But these students, it is to be hoped, are

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