of an old place nor the comforts of a new one. Imposing shops, with all sorts of Viennese and Parisian goods, chiefly neckties and ready-made clothing, crowd the shanties where native rawhide sandals are made, and the street butcher slaughters his animal before the plate-glass window of a large grocery, filled with English, French, and German delicacies. Some of the streets are well paved and kept in repair, while in others the passer often stumbles over the half-buried shells thrown into the town by the Russians in 1877. For about thirty miles below Rustchuk both shores are flat and devoid of life. We had our old enemy, a head-wind, against us; and, indeed, from this point to the end of our journey--about 300 miles below--we scarcely had an hour’s relief from this persistent opposition to our progress. We had fought our way for a few miles, when we overtook a tow-boat with several large Greek grain lighters steaming down-river at less speed than we were making. As we ran alongside, the captain of one of the lighters cordially invited us to tie up and take it easy. Perhaps it was not a very sporting thing to do, but it appealed to us as an excellent scheme to defeat the efforts of the head-wind and to see the landscape at our leisure, and we therefore promptly accepted the invitation, and fastened our canoes to the lighters. In this way we slowly went on for several hours, until we came to the town of Turtukai, on the Bulgarian side, where the hills again crowd the river. There we cast off, and instinctively avoiding the Roumanian pickets, whose unwelcome attentions we had escaped for several days, paddled down to a beautiful camping-ground in the middle of a group of islands covered with poplar, wych-elm, willows, and brambles, and a tangle of wild-grape vines growing to the tops of the highest trees. From the important part the town and fortress of Silistria [Illustration: MOSQUE IN SILISTRIA] has played in the history of European Turkey for the last hundred years, we anticipated finding a stronghold far more grand and imposing than any on the river, with the possible exception of Belgrade and Peterwardein. Whatever may have been in past times the strategical importance of the place, it certainly gave us little notion of its strength. It occupies the whole of a low point projecting far into the [Illustration: FROM RUSTCHUK TO SULINA]