From the lofty ruins with their sinister memories we pass on through the continuously beautiful Wachau with its steep, wooded mountains on the right, its lower hills on the left, on the sides of which many vineyards soon become familiar. Several small villages are passed, and beyond Schwallenbach on the left we see an extraordinary piece of rocky formation running in wall-like fashion down the face of a hillside to the river. Softer rock has been worn away until the ridge remains very much like a roughly made wall built of irregular-sized blocks of stone--like one of our west-country stone field-walls exaggerated to a gigantic extent. It is little wonder that local lore has ascribed to this ridge a demoniac origin. It is known as the Teufelsmauer, or Devil’s Wall, but why the Devil concerned himself in erecting it I have not been able to ascertain further than the suggestion that he had taken it into his head to block up the Danube at this spot, but by some special intervention of Providence was stopped before the undertaking had got beyond the building of this wall. Where, for the new railway, a path has been blasted along the rock here, the lower end of the wall has been left intact by tunnelling through it. The first stopping place for the steamer after leaving Aggsbach is Spitz, a small town lying about the foot of a conical hill, scored to the top with vineyard lines, with vineyards extending also up the neighbouring hills, while on the mountain-side above it are the picturesque ruins of an old castle. [Illustration: THE DEVIL’S WALL] Spitz is regarded as the most important centre of the Wachau wine district, and so closely is every available piece of ground utilized, that a local saying has it that the town is one in which the wine grows in the market place. The grape is not the only fruit grown here, for there are also many peach orchards, and quantities of this fruit are taken aboard before the boat continues its journey Vienna-wards. All along here the vineyards offer many pleasant pictures to the pedestrian who loiters about in October when the grape harvest is being gathered. From the narrow terraces on which the vines are grown along the steep hillsides barefooted men and women, boys and girls, are to be seen descending with long pottle-shaped wooden baskets on their backs, piled high with fruit. Many times, too, great vats stand by the road-side at the foot of the vineyard, into which the grapes are turned, and where they are pounded and squashed with great wooden clubs. Then a couple of oxen will come slowly along drawing a large barrel on a cart frame, and into this barrel a man “spoons” the juice from the great tub, much as our farm hands in country districts fill their water-carts from a pond.