sober history has far more to recount than saga and legend, for every spot we pass has its story of ambition, intrigue and revenge; of wars involving the loss of thrones and far-reaching changes in the map of the then known world. At Dürrenstein, further down the river, are the ruins of a great feudal stronghold in which is still shown the dungeon in which tradition says Richard Coeur de Lion, on his return from the Third Crusade, was imprisoned by his inexorable enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria. The legend, telling how the English King’s liberation was finally effected through his devoted minstrel, Blondel, has long been a favorite theme of poets and artists.[7] It was not far from Dürrenstein that Julian the Apostate engaged a flotilla for his famous voyage down the Danube--the beginning of that long campaign which was to end so disastrously for him and his army on the sun-parched banks of the far distant Tigris. At a subsequent period Charlemagne and his Paladins descended the Danube on his campaign against the Avars. Later on he was followed by numerous contingents of Crusaders, among them heroic Barbarossa and his valiant band, on their way to Constantinople and the Holy Land. It is safe to say that no waterway in Europe has more frequently witnessed the march of vast armies or heard more frequently the echoed roll of battle than has the broadly sweeping Danube. In its wide and fertile valley have met in deadly conflict the well-trained legions of a Prince Eugene of Savoy, a Gustavus Adolphus, a Marlborough, a Bonaparte, and on the issue of the battles in which they were engaged were decided the fate of nations and the course of civilization. Augustus, it was, who made the Danube the northern boundary of the Roman Empire. It extended like a broad and impassable moat from the Schwartzwald to the Euxine, and, like the Rhine on the East of Gaul, served to keep the barbarians of the north confined within their primeval forests. All along the Danube from its source to its delta are still found countless traces of what were once important military outposts, flourishing towns and centers of advancing civilization and culture. After passing through the picturesque gorge of Wachau, famed for its wild scenery, its haunted castles, its oak-covered heights, its precipitous crags once crowned by massive strongholds which were tenanted by robber knights who were long the terror of the surrounding country, we enter an extensive plain which the branching Danube cuts into a number of willow and birch-covered islands. Soon, on the right, we reach the mouth of the river Traisen, near whose confluence with the Danube stands Traisenmauer, noted in the Nibelungenlied as being the home of Helka, Etzel’s first queen, and the last stopping place of Kriemhild before her arrival at Tulna, where the King of the Huns was awaiting her. The progress of the brilliant cavalcade, with all its glittering pomp and pageantry, composed of