in a wide curve, changing its course from a general easterly to a northerly direction, and at Hirsova, thirty miles below--a long straggling town at the foot of a bold spur of rocky hills--it divides into a number of small branches, which enclose and intersect with sinuous windings a great irregular marsh, twelve or fifteen miles in width, and extending to the River Pruth, at the Russian frontier, fifty miles to the north. As we left Hirsova, near the end of the day, and saw the [Illustration: HIRSOVA] grand outlines of the hills grow all purple in the afternoon light, we were slow to realize the fact that our route would no longer lead us past these pleasant slopes, which from the distant Carpathian range downward had shown us an ever-varying and ever-beautiful panorama along the river-bank. The shortest of the sluggish branches of the river skirts the eastern limits of the Roumanian plain, and paddling into this narrow channel, we found ourselves in a brief half-hour in a region quite unlike any we had yet seen. Both banks are low, and covered with tall reeds alternating with willow patches. The only habitations are little fishing-stations, and these are miles apart. Even the line of picket-houses is no longer seen along the shore, for it follows the branch that flows along the eastern boundary of the marsh under the high land there. The fishermen’s dwellings are hovels of the rudest kind, built of mud, thatched with reeds, and surrounded by fences of the same material. How human beings can exist in these fever-infested marshes will always remain a mystery to us.