“By our camp at the mouth of the Traun (July 6th), I noticed purple and yellow loosestrife, meadowsweet, meadow-rue, white convolvulus, and the same flowers generally that grow by English rivers. Sea-buckthorn grew among the willows. By wood opposite Grein saw cyclamen, pyrola, hepatica, and various ferns, and monk’s-hood just below.” A light rain, which began while we were in camp opposite the restored Castle of Rannariedl, continued during the whole day we were passing through the gorge, and, although we got a fair notion of the beauties of the scenery, we deplored the absence of sunshine more for esthetic reasons than for demands of personal comfort. We were cheered a good bit by a jolly luncheon at the little mountain village of Obermühl, and while the lowering clouds were still sweeping across the summits, and ragged patches of vapor were trailing along the mountain flanks, we paddled out of the gorge and past the town of Aschach, where we were diverted by the difficulty of dodging a curious ferry, which, as we floated down, seemed to blockade the river by an impassable line of great flat-boats chained closely together. The uppermost boat of the line we soon found to be moored in mid-stream a goodly distance above the town, while to the lowermost one was attached a great double-decked ferry-boat which, by ready adjustment of the angle of its side to the current, was forced across the river by the rush of the water in exactly the same way that a vessel is propelled at right angles to the wind. The net-work of side streams and lagoons between Aschach and Ottensheim, just above Linz, a distance of ten miles or more, is simplified to the boatman by a line of fine stone dikes on either bank, which confine the current to a comparatively straight and narrow channel, and we passed this tangle, which appeared on the map to be very difficult of navigation, almost without knowing it, certainly without recognizing any resemblance to our chart. A narrow chain of hills concealed Linz from our view until after Ottensheim was passed, and the sight of an ordinary four-wheeled cab, with the usual rawboned horse and red-faced driver, crawling along the level river-side road, was the first hint we received of the flourishing, modernized, and somewhat commonplace character of the prosperous city.