"What a river!" I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had
traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been
obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

"Won't stand much nonsense now, will it?" he said, pulling the canoe a
little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a
nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements--water,
wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun--thinking of the long journey
that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea,
and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming traveling
companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any
other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its
aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood
gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the
great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved,
unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living
creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it
became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being,
through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its
mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly
and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a
Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret
life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent,