and pillaged by some neighbouring knight or prelate, with whom he was at feud, and on whom he now stands meditating swift and bloody retribution. For hours and hours the traveller may wind through these rocky defiles without meeting one object to scare the spirit of romance, which rises here in all her gloomy grandeur before him.” The sentimentalist who needed gloomy grandeur as a necessary setting for romance went on to say that he would almost weep to see a post road cut beside the lonely Schlägen, or a steamboat floundering and smoking through the Strudel and the Wirbel. There is as yet no post road along the Schlägen--there is little likely to be, it may well be thought--but daily steamers “flounder and smoke” through the lovely scenery of the Strudel and Wirbel. Schlägen is the name of the village on the right bank where the first turn of the river sweeps round Haichenbach’s rocky ridge, into the “gloomy defile” where the precipitous cliffs rise in some places as much as a thousand feet above the river, here greatly contracted in width. Says the chronicler of the adventurous boat journey: “on turning the sharp corner of Schlägen, where the river almost runs back in the contrary direction to that which it did immediately before, we found ourselves in the most imposing part of this splendid pass, the hills on each [side] rising nearly one thousand feet from the water’s edge; the water was boiling and seething as if over a fire, which imparted a motion to our boat, somewhat like that which one feels when sitting in the back seat of a dog-cart, with the horse galloping; which is a peculiar sensation, I assure you, fair reader, and if you have a brother and he has such a vehicle, make him take you a turn in that fashion, and you will understand how we felt as we swung round the rocky corners of the confined and tortuous defile.” The journey is less exciting, but no less memorable, taken on a steamer to-day. After passing the northern side of the ridge on which Haichenbach stands the Danube swerves again almost as sharply round the rocky cliff of the right bank--the sinuosities of its course are so complicated, that within the space of twelve or fifteen miles it flows towards all the four points of the compass, only to bend again to the right as it nears the pleasant village of Ober Mühl at the foot of a hill where the Kleine Mühlbach flows in from the mountains. Again it sweeps round a kind of peninsula-point to the left, and so past Unter Mühl to a sight of Neuhaus, high on its almost perpendicular rock. This is also known as the Schloss Schaumburg from the name of the Counts who once owned it, but who lost it to Austria.