Another poet, or, at least, verse-writer, was deserted altogether by his boatman. This was John Taylor, on his way back from Prague. He had taken to the river at Leitmeritz, with his two companions and some one else's widow and her four small children, they having jointly bought a boat forty-eight feet by three. It was at the Saxony boundary that the man ran away, whence there were six hundred miles to cover, past one thousand "shelves and sands," eight hundred islands, and numberless tree-stumps and rocks, two hundred and forty of the islands having a mill on one side, but which side was not visible beforehand. His figures, however, need not be taken too literally as he went "gathering," to use his own words, "like a busy bee, all these honied observations; some by sight, some by hearing, some by both, some by neither, and some by bare supposition." Equally exciting was Busbecq's passage down the Danube in a boat roped to a 24-oar pinnace. He was behind time, so they rowed night and day, pulling hard against a violent wind. The bed of the river was uncared for, and collisions with tree-stumps were frequent; once it was with the bank, so hard that a few planks came away. But the ambassador got no further answer to his remonstrances than "God will help" from the Turkish rowers. The Danube was mainly a Turkish river then. On the lakes there were, of course, storms to contend with, two of which nearly drowned two of the most gifted men of the century, De Thou the historian, and the artist Cellini. It is fairly clear, too, that their almost identical experiences took place on the same lake; that of Wallenstadt, although neither of them gives the name. The boat De Thou crossed in was made of fir-trunks, neither sound, nor tarred, nor nailed; a German was in it, too, with his horse, which fell about; the helmsman left his post, called out to all to save themselves if they could; nothing was to be seen but rain and lake and perpendicular rock, until a cave was sighted towards which all joined in an effort to row. A way up the rock was found, at the top, an inn, just where Cellini had found one nearly half a century earlier. On the rivers themselves there were two further disadvantages to meet; delay through running aground and danger in shooting the bridges. The latter was very great: the bridge which gave its name to Pont-St.-Esprit on the Rhone was as notorious a place for shipwrecks as any headland, and no doubt it happened then, as it used to happen later, at Beaugency, on the Loire, that all card-playing and talking ceased from the moment the boatmen began to prepare for the passage underneath till the passage was safely over. As for running aground, it did not happen so often as might have been expected, to judge by what is left unsaid by the travellers: one must not strike any average from Peter Mundy's feat of doing it forty times in two days. [Illustration: LOCK BETWEEN BOLOGNA AND FERRARA]