The bazaar, with its little café tables under the acacias, its red-bricked paths, its low houses washed with brilliant blues and greens, its group of men and boys, its shop-keepers standing in their doorways fingering their “Tespis,” or strings of beads, is a true and interesting glimpse of the Orient. The plain mosque, above one of the battered walls, has little to show beyond a magnificent carpet covering its floor space, though outside is a picturesque roofed-in well, grown closely round with a wealth of vari-coloured convolvuluses, admiring which, in company with a Japanese visitor, I learned that in Japan as in England the flower is known as “the morning glory.” A series of embayed arches under the walls, all of the same crumbling red brick, known as the catacombs, suggest something of the security of the place in the old days when it was a powerful fort. Its military importance is still acknowledged by a small Austrian garrison being kept on it. Despite this evidence of changed authority it remains essentially Turkish. On one of the gateways of the fortress is a memorial inscription in Turkish, along which have been placed, within recent years, other tablets rendering the inscription in Magyar and German. It is to the following effect:-- “Open is the way of glory To him who was glorious in deeds Similar to those of the old times of heroes. His heart was pure and high-thinking, His will was great and powerful. The defeater and the ruin of the enemies, The benefactor and protector of the people, His glory was doubled when he conquered this fortress, And the frontiers of his country were enlarged Greatly as a powerfully running torrent. God save him from all evil Because he has done much good in the world, He whom we are remembering to-day, That is to say Mahmud Khan. 1739.” When Ada Kaleh passed under the Austro-Hungarian Crown, I am told, the inhabitants wished to return to Turkey, but were induced to remain by the promise that the Sultan should send them each year a shipload of tobacco, coffee, and other commodities. On this annual gift, their gardening, and their fishing, presumably the inhabitants live; they have the privilege of fishing in the Danube from near Orsova to the Rumanian frontier by payment of a merely nominal annual fee.