Most of the earlier describers of the Danube began the account of their downward journeying at Ratisbon--except the adventurous three who navigated the “Water Lily,” and they joined the great river by way of the Main and Danube Canal, and so reached the latter stream at Kelheim. If we look at the general map of Europe it is easy to recognize why this should be so, and even now, probably, most tourists intending to take the passenger steamers from where they start at Passau make first for Ratisbon, and they are all well rewarded by so doing. Though it is the many old houses and towers, the twin crocketed spires of delicate openwork of the cathedral, the many nooks and corners and amazingly artistic “bits” that impress us when we wander about the town, it is here the river that claims our first attention. The wonderful “blue” river, seen as I saw it here under heavy grey skies, shows of a warm green colour--a green on the yellow side of greenness. Strauss’s waltz has impressed the “blue” Danube on our minds most persistently, yet here again and again we find ourselves commenting on its greenness and even its greyness, and wondering why it should have got its reputation for blueness. Inquiry of the captain of a Danube steamer settled the matter. “If you want to see the Danube _really_ blue you must come to it in the winter,” said he. When we stand in autumn on the fine old twelfth century stone bridge-built, says tradition, by the devil--or walk about the long islands Ober Wöhrd and Unterer Wöhrd--islands which are really one, being connected by a narrow spit of land--it is the wonderful yellowish greenness of the rapidly swirling water that strikes us, that and the rapidity of the current which, as it is forced into narrow channels by the isletted piers of the bridge, whirls and swirls onwards, breaking into white foam. The bridge rises gradually to where, about the centre of it, there is on the western parapet the statue of the “Brückenmännchen,” the “little bridge man,” or naked figure of a boy seated astride a wedge of stone, and with hand shading his eyes, looking at the cathedral spires. It is an ingenious piece of statuary, for even as if one person pauses in the street and looks upwards, other passers-by will inevitably do the same, having reached this point on the bridge we almost instinctively turn to look in the direction the “Mannchen” is ever looking, and doing so we get a beautiful view of the old town dominated by the beautiful spires, the Golden Tower and other high buildings rising from a grand medley of roofs, while in the foreground is the quaint old stone gateway through which we reach the bridge, close-neighboured by a fine steep stretch of dark tiled roof, broken by its little dormers--presumably for ventilating purposes. Looking up-stream from here, we have the Ober Wöhrd, largely covered with buildings, and on the further side of it a pleasant tree-grown