It was autumn when I journeyed down the Danube, but even then, at every place I stayed and along such stretches of the river as I explored afoot, the wealth of flowers was such as to suggest how much greater it must be in spring and summer. And it may be said that, impressive as is the ever-changing panorama seen from the comfortable steamers, the river becomes the more endeared to us the more we can explore of such details as cannot be seen, or can be but glanced at from the water. Certainly much of the Servian shore looks so inviting as to suggest that Miss Skene’s enthusiasm was not too fervid. Shortly after we emerge from between the hills that border the cataracts of the Iron Gate, the hills fall away on either side, and we pass between banks low on the Servian and higher on the Rumanian shores. Small villages are seen, the second of these on the right being Kladova, which is interesting as having been the Roman station of Egeta--the starting point, presumably, of the two important lines of conquest represented by Trajan’s road along the Danube bank and by the other which passed north into Dacia from a bridge across the river, some of the bricks of which “are alive at this day to testify.” This bridge crossed the Danube from the Servian shore, some distance below Turn Severin, a Rumanian town which is presumed to take its name from the scrap of an ancient tower supposed to have been built by Severinus. Trajan’s bridge is described by Gibbon as having consisted of twenty-two stone piles with wooden arches; other writers refer to it as a stone bridge, which seems to be more likely, if it be true that, when it was destroyed by Hadrian with the object of preventing the invasion of the Goths, its ruins stopped the course of the river. Gibbon refers to the river here as being shallow and the current gentle; but it was assuredly rapid enough when I was there to suggest that Apollodorus, the architect, must have had a sufficiently formidable task when he set about building the bridge for Trajan. Only scraps of the bridge-head are now visible. Michael Joseph Quin, who made a steam voyage down the Danube in 1834, appears to have been one of the first of the moderns to fix the situation of the bridge and to describe it. The “Count” of his notes, it may be mentioned, was Count Széchenyi, “the great Hungarian,” who was then superintending the making of his great road, and with whom Quin had the good fortune to travel some distance down the river below Orsova: