But it is not my intention to describe even briefly the countless objects which have so long rendered this famous old city a favorite object to the tourist. To do even partial justice to its multitudinous attractions and historical associations would require a large volume. My purpose in coming to Ratisbon was to embark on one of the small boats that here ply on the Danube, with the view of connecting at Passau, further down the river, with one of the larger boats of the Danube Steamship Navigation Company, which would take me to Vienna. Thence I planned to go by steamers of the same company to Budapest, Belgrade and the mouth of the Danube, whence I had planned to sail by the Black Sea and the Bosphorus to Constantinople. But why, the reader will ask, did I elect the slower and more roundabout route rather than the direct one by rail? I answer in the words of Ovid: _Ignotis errare locis, ignota videre_ _Flumina gaudebant, studio minuente laborem._[2] I had always loved the water and traveling by river has always had a peculiar fascination for me. Besides this, I had for years been specially eager to journey by the Danube from its source to its mouth. Having had the good fortune to sail the entire navigable length of many of the world’s largest rivers, I was doubly desirous of sailing down the historic waterway which connects the noted Black Forest with the famed Euxine Sea of antiquity. In one of his charming travel-books, Victor Hugo declares: The Rhine is unique: it combines the quality of every river. Like the Rhone, it is rapid; broad, like the Loire; encased like the Meuse; serpentine like the Seine; limpid and green like the Somme; mysterious like the Nile; spangled with gold, like an American river; and, like a river of Asia, abounding with phantoms and fables.[3] Hesiod, who first makes mention of the Danube, under the name of the Ister, gives it the epithet of καλλίρέεδρος--the beautifully flowing--and calls it the son of Tethys and Oceanus. Ovid was so impressed with it that he declares in one of his _Paitic Epistles_, that it is not inferior to the Nile: _Cedere Danubius se tibi, Nile, negat._[4] Hugo’s brief but graphic description of some of the world’s famed rivers applies with even greater truth to the legendary, the historic, the romantic, the picturesque Danube. No watercourse in the world is tenanted by a larger number of fantastic and mysterious beings; some, like the swan-maidens and the water nymph Isa, making their home in its waters; others, like fairies and pixies and elves, dwelling in the bays, forests, caverns and old dismantled castles on its banks.