over the water’s edge. Here the Roman road is almost practicable in parts, and under a great towering precipice, where a projecting rock pushes out boldly into the deep channel, the great general caused, in the year 103, a tablet to be carved in the solid rock, on which may still be read the inscription: IMP·CAESAR·DIVI·NERVAE·F· NERVA·TRAIANVS·AVG·GERM PONTIF·MAXMVS·TRIB·OT * * ***** RIAE·CO ***** commemorating his victory over nature as well as over man. Nature has not forgiven Trajan the desecration of this, one of her sublimest works, and in the lapse of centuries she has gradually eaten away the hard rock tablet, threatening it with utter destruction, in spite of the projecting stone above it, until solid masonry supports have been erected to hold the shattered inscription in its place. As we were sketching the spot, with its interesting traces of the Roman road showing where the posts were fastened to the rock to support the platforms necessary to widen the path, two natives came paddling up under the edge of the cliff in a dugout canoe, and moored their boat at the corner, where, on the old Roman road-bed, they had a little fishing camp. Canoe, implements, dress, were the same as in the days when their remote ancestors piloted Trajan’s galleys through the dangerous eddies of the defile. Dacia Felix is now only a name, and a shattered tablet and crumbling traces of the first great highway along the Danube alone remain to remind us of the great general’s conquests of this remote region, and to suggest something of the civilization he founded there. But the peasant is still unchanged in type and costume, speaks a language closely allied to the old Roman dialect, tills the ground and catches fish with the same rude implements that Trajan found in the hands of the happy barbarians of Dacia Felix. It was long after dark before we steered our canoes by the twinkling lights of Orsova to the steamboat-landing there. The tinkle of gypsy music in the garden restaurant by the river-bank echoed across the silently-flowing stream, now silvered by the moon, which tardily rose above the great mountains. We heard again the soft accents of the Magyar tongue and the intoxicating strains of the csáardás. The wild gypsy leader poured his music into our eager ears, drawing his nervous bow under our very hat-brims, lest we should lose some quaver of the stirring chords. Long into the night we sat there, captive to the music and the beauty of the moonlit landscape, loath to lose one moment of the few precious hours that remained to us in bewitching, beloved Hungary. [Illustration: REMAINS OF TRAJAN’S ROAD NEAR ORSOVA]