Now the steamer has its advantages over the train, for surely nowhere in
this locomotive world can a man more thoroughly enjoy "sweetly doing
nothing" than on board one of these river-boats. You are wafted swiftly
onward through pure air and sunshine; you have an armchair under the
awning; of course an amusing French novel; besides, truth to say, there
is plenty to amuse you on board. Once past Vienna, your moorings are cut
from the old familiar West; the costumes, the faces, the architecture,
and even the way of not doing things, have all a flavour of the East.

What a hotch-potch of races, so to speak, all in one boat, but ready to
do anything rather than pull together; even here, between stem and stern
of our Danube steamer, are Magyars, Germans, Servians, Croats,
Roumanians, Jews, and gipsies. They are all unsatisfied people with
aspirations; no two are agreed--everybody wants something else down
here, and how Heaven is to grant all the prayers of those who have the
grace to pray, or how otherwise to settle the Eastern Question, I will
not pretend to say.

Meanwhile the world amuses itself--I mean the microcosm on board the
steamer: people, ladies not excepted, play cards, drink coffee, and
smoke. There is a good opportunity of studying the latest Parisian
fashions, as worn by Roumanian belles; they know how to dress, do those
handsome girls from Bucharest.

When steam navigation was first established on the Danube, as long ago
as 1830, Prince Demidoff remarked, that "in making the Danube one of the
great commercial highways of the world, steam had united the East with
the West." It was a smart saying, but it was not a thing accomplished
when the Prince wrote his Travels, nor is it now; for though the "Danube
Steam Navigation Company" have been running their boats for nearly half