As even those who take a more or less hurried journey along the Danube should make a stay, however short, in this neighbourhood, I will take up the story of the shore from Grein. Leaving that pleasant town by the road cut along the foot of the cliff, we get, looking back from the opposite corner of the “bay” which the bending river here forms, a picturesque view of the Coburg castle above the town, and the timber-grown hill to the left. The road is here cut along the very rock which in bold crags towers above our heads, while on the further side of the river are densely wooded hills. At the corner we are directly above the swirling waters of the Greiner-schwall, and after a pleasant walk of about a mile come opposite the western end of the Wörth island, with a capital view of the wooded rock surmounted by its cross, and on the left bank of the river the boldly perched ruins of the castle of Struden or Werfenstein. Before reaching these, however, we pass the opening of a narrow valley--the “Stillenstein Klamm,” which, before we have been long in Grein, is known to be one of the special view-places of the neighbourhood. From this valley, beneath the high viaduct of the new railway which spans it just before it reaches the Danube, comes a small hurrying brook, the course of which should be followed by any lover of woodlands and water. Passing the mill that stands a little way up the valley, we may follow a path that keeps fairly close to the stream for two or three miles up to the very point where it emerges from beneath the Stillenstein itself--a great mass of rock, with a couple of pine trees growing on it, which has fallen at some immemorial period and got wedged between the opposite rocky sides of the valley. From the black cavern under this rock the stream emerges, at once as a cascade; and as an almost continuous series of cascades it continues all the way to the great river to which it adds its contribution. Here and there are pools in which many trout are to be seen “staying their wavy bodies against the stream.” The principal “fall” is where the water has got imprisoned between great rocks and falls over in a wedge-like shape, a mass of foaming white. The mountains rise steeply on either side as we pass up the “Klamm,” clothed from the very water’s edge--their boughs almost intermingling above it in places--with beech and pine and other trees. About the great grey boulders of rock are a profusion of ferns and mosses: the whole is like the beauty of some Devonshire lane and stream raised to the _n_th--a kind of lyric loveliness that uplifts and gladdens, where the grandeur of the great river to which the stream is hurrying has something rather of epic sweep and solemnity.