kilometres. For Igali it is quite an adventurous morning. Ere we had
left the shadows of Peterwardein fortress he upset while wheeling beneath
some overhanging mulberry-boughs that threatened destruction to his
jockey-cap; soon after parting company with the lieutenant he gets into
an altercation with a gang of gypsies about being the cause of their
horses breaking loose from their picket-ropes and stampeding, and then
making uncivil comments upon the circumstance; an hour after this he
overturns again and breaks a pedal, and when we dismount at Indjia, for
our noontide halt, he discovers that his saddle-spring has snapped in
the middle. As he ruefully surveys the breakage caused by the roughness
of the Fruskagora roads, and sends out to scour the village for a mechanic
capable of undertaking the repairs, he eyes my Columbia wistfully, and
asks me for the address where one like it can be obtained. The blacksmith
is not prepared to mend the spring, although he makes a good job of the
pedal, and it takes a carpenter and his assistant from 1.30 to 4.30 P.M.
to manufacture a grooved piece of wood to fit between the spring and
backbone so that he can ride with me to Belgrade. It would have been a
fifteen-minute task for a Yankee carpenter. We have been traversing a
spur of the Fruskagora Mountains all the morning, and our progress has
been slow. The roads through here are mainly of the natural soil, and
correspondingly bad; but the glorious views of the Danube, with its
alternating wealth of green woods and greener cultivated areas, fully
recompense for the extra toil. Prune-orchards, the trees weighed down
with fruit yet green, clothe the hill-sides with their luxuriance; indeed,
the whole broad, rich valley of the Danube seems nodding and smiling in
the consciousness of overflowing plenty; for days we have traversed roads
leading through vineyards and orchards, and broad areas with promising-looking
grain-crops.

It is but thirty kilometres from Indjia to Semlin, on the riverbank