If, however, there is a certain sameness about the river scenery from Budapest to Zimony (Semlin) and the neighbourhood of Belgrade, it is by no means unattractive; and on the journey we pass some places that are intimately bound up with the fortunes of the Hungarian kingdom, including a spot at which that kingdom received a crushing blow in one century and avenged it in the next. Just below Budapest the river branches, forming two streams along the island of Csepel, which is about thirty miles in length. Numerous water-mills are again seen on the river, both here and lower down--largely used, presumably, for the grain grown on that rich long strip of the Alföld, that lies between the Danube and the Tisza (Theiss). The steamer stops at several places not calling for special mention. A little below Budapest we pass on the right a château, once the property of Prince Eugène--presumably part of the great inheritance which that celebrated “Mars without a Venus” bequeathed to a niece. Below this, at Nagytétény, are some ruins; while further along, at Erd, is a relic of the Turkish occupation, in the form of a strong tower. Some distance below the southern end of the Csepel island is Dunaföldvár on high ground, and beyond here the Danube, though maintaining its southerly course, winds tortuously through broad marsh lands. About forty miles west of the Danube, as we near Dunaföldvár, lies the great lake Balaton (Platten See). From Kalocsa, some distance inland from Nszód, on the left bank is a short branch railway line to Kis Körös, the birthplace of Alexander Petófi. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu journeyed with her husband to the near East, they went from Vienna to Budapest and thence to Belgrade by the land route, refusing to wait until the Danube had thawed that they might travel by boat. “Almost everybody I see frights me with some new difficulty. Prince Eugène has been so good as to say all the things he could to persuade me to stay till the Danube is thawed, that I may have the conveniency of going by water, assuring me that the houses in Hungary are such as are no defence against the weather, and that I shall be obliged to travel three or four days between Buda and Esseek, without finding any house at all, through desart plains covered with snow; where the cold is so violent, many have been killed by it.” After she had passed over this stage of her journey, she wrote, “this part of the country is very much overgrown with wood, and little frequented. ’Tis incredible what vast numbers of wildfowl we saw, which often live here to a good old age--and undisturbed by guns in quiet sleep.”