Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Lesley Halamek and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net =LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE= OF _POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_. AUGUST, 1878. * * * * * Footnote: Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1878, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. * * * * * ALONG THE DANUBE. [Illustration: SOMENDRIA.] Ada-Kale is a Turkish fortress which seems to spring directly from the bosom of the Danube at a point where three curious and quarrelsome races come into contact, and where the Ottoman thought it necessary to have a foothold even in times of profound peace. To the traveller from Western Europe no spectacle on the way to Constantinople was so impressive as this ancient and picturesque fortification, suddenly affronting the vision with its odd walls, its minarets, its red-capped sentries, and the yellow sinister faces peering from balconies suspended above the current. It was the first glimpse of the Orient which one obtained; it appropriately introduced one to a domain which is governed by sword and gun; and it was a pretty spot of color in the midst of the severe and rather solemn scenery of the Danubian stream. Ada-Kale is to be razed to the water's edge--so, at least, the treaty between Russia and Turkey has ordained--and the Servian mountaineers will no longer see the Crescent flag flying within rifle-shot of the crags from which, by their heroic devotion in unequal battle, they long ago banished it. The Turks occupying this fortress during the recent war evidently relied upon Fate for their protection, for the walls of Ada-Kale are within a stone's throw of the Roumanian shore, and every Mussulman in the place could have been captured in twenty minutes. I passed by there one morning on the road from Orsova, on the frontier of Hungary, to Bucharest, and was somewhat amused to see an elderly Turk seated in a small boat near the Roumanian bank fishing. Behind him were two soldiers, who served as oarsmen, and rowed him gently from point to point when he gave the signal. Scarcely six hundred feet from him stood a Wallachian sentry, watching his movements in lazy, indifferent fashion. And this was at the moment that the Turks were bombarding Kalafat in Roumania from Widdin on the Bulgarian side of the Danube! Such a spectacle could be witnessed nowhere save in this land, "where it is always afternoon," where people at times seem to suspend respiration because they are too idle to breathe, and where even a dog will protest if you ask him to move quickly out of your path. The old Turk doubtless fished in silence and calm until the end of the war, for I never heard of the removal of either himself or his companions.