From the picturesque point of view, there is something of sameness in the last few hundred miles of Danube scenery--nothing of outstanding beauty or grandeur of scenery is to be looked for below the Iron Gate, though there is an undoubted beauty of its own belonging to a broad river passing through a great and variedly fruitful plain. The chief charm of the lowest part of the journey down the Danube is, however, to be found less in scenery than in the varieties of people to be seen, and the great variation of national costume as the traveller touches at towns in Servia, Rumania, and Bulgaria. It was at Turn Severin that Prince Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen landed “under a feigned name and with a false passport,” from an Austrian steamer, on 20 May, 1866, when he had been called, by an almost unanimous vote of the Rumanian people, to be their ruler in place of Prince Alexander, who had been forced to abdicate. A conference of the Powers at Paris, had decided that the Prince of Rumania must be a native, but the Rumanians had decided on Prince Charles, and acting on Bismarck’s advice, he decided to confront the Powers with a _fait accompli_--hence the secret arrival at Turn Severin, where incognito was thrown off, and the prince was hailed with delight. He has justified the _coup_ by proving one of the wisest and best of European sovereigns. Shortly below Turn Severin the river, after running in a south-easterly direction, sweeps round a curve, until it flows for a short distance in almost the opposite way, bringing into sight again the hills that have been left, and the distant Balkans to the south-west. Divided by various islands and at low water exposing many sandbanks, the river goes on past villages on either side, with signs of pleasant prosperity which suggest that Michael Quin’s forecast may yet be fulfilled. When he wrote, the people of Wallachia had largely migrated to Hungary, owing to the continuously unsettled condition of their own land; but he confidently predicted that when the population increased, when their habitations improved and their industry came to be encouraged by the influence of order and the laws, and they should feel themselves safe from the spoliation of marauding armies, then they would be enabled “to convert the whole of that region into a Paradise.”