bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the
sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows
never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they
remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on
slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as
grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the
impression that the entire plain is moving and _alive_. For the wind
sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves
instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the
branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their under-side turns
to the sun.

Happy to slip beyond the control of stern banks, the Danube here wanders
about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the
islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a
shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing
at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and
forming new islands innumerable which shift daily in size and shape and
possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates
their very existence.

Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river's life begins soon
after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent
and frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about
mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before
sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving
it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills
of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend
under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on
the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman