Passau is, as has already been said, the starting place for the passenger steamers of the Danube Steamship Navigation Company. From here we may on these vessels--changing now and again into larger boats as we proceed--journey the many hundred miles of waterway that lie between here and the Black Sea. And very pleasant journeying it is, the steamers being thoroughly well equipped and providing within their necessarily circumscribed space, all the comforts of a good and moderate hotel. I feel impelled to say this because readers of some old books on Danube travel might fancy that conditions had not changed since the authors of those books wrote their strong condemnations. In a work published in 1854, on “Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk,” the following emphatic words appear: “The Danube steamers are a disgrace to Austria. Nothing could be worse than the manner in which they are conducted. The want of civility towards strangers is most offensive, the imposition of the stewards in their charges for food is quite shameful, the irregularity and disorder in the arrangements on board are exceedingly annoying, and the total contempt of cleanliness everywhere visible is altogether disgusting.” To-day those words are merely ridiculous. Every sentence should now be rewritten in the very opposite sense. I journeyed on many of the steamers--the appointments of which may well make Londoners wish that the Thames had a service of steamers in any way comparable! The boats are, indeed, thoroughly up-to-date; the cost of living in them is anything but extravagant, and the standard of comfort excellent. They are as far removed from the style described by the writer I have quoted, as our third-class railway carriages are from the open trucks in which our grandparents journeyed when railways were new. It is interesting to learn that it was as early as 1819 that patent rights were first granted for navigation of the Danube by steam vessels, though little seems to have been done for ten years. Then in 1828, a new patent for fifteen years was granted to two Englishmen, John Andrews and Joseph Pritchard, through whose energies the Danube Steamship Company was formed. In 1830, the first steamer was put on the river, and thenceforward the development was rapid. Four years later the first steamer safely passed the Iron Gate and voyaged down to Galatz. Now the Danube Steamship Company has an immense fleet of passenger boats and tugs navigating the Danube from Ratisbon to Sulina, as well as some of the chief tributaries of the great river; Hungary has another fine river steamship service as well, and so also has Rumania.