About a week before the declaration of war, two Roumanian officers came down the Danube from Kalafat, and landed at my hotel, where they were stopped and told that they could go no farther. One of them was a Captain Giorgione, whom I met and asked to dine with me before he went back to Kalafat. He accepted my invitation, and after a long and pleasant conversation about the general situation and the prospects of war he gave me a cordial invitation to go across the river to Kalafat and pay him a visit in his quarters. As hostilities were expected to break out at any moment, no one was allowed to cross the Danube from our side without a special permit from Osman Pasha; and as there was no probability that he would grant me the necessary permission, I determined to make the trip on my own account. Possibly this was an indiscretion on my part; but indiscretions are apt to be the most enjoyable things in life, and I was getting tired of the humdrum routine of the camp. I had my English passport with me, which ensured my safe conduct until the actual declaration of hostilities; and armed with this precious document, I got one of my colleagues to act as _locum tenens_ during my temporary absence from my practice, and hired a boat and a crew of boatmen to take me over the river, which at this point is nearly a mile wide, and flows with a current of extraordinary velocity. I dressed myself in a suit of mufti, but had no hat, and must have presented rather a piebald appearance with a Turkish fez surmounting a suit of English tweed. The Roumanian customs officers stared at me pretty hard, but they franked me through on my English passport, and I went into Kalafat, leaving my boatmen on the Roumanian side of the river to bring me back the same night. I strolled into a café in Kalafat, which was then a town of about three thousand people; and the experience of living again in the European fashion, eating at a table, sitting on a chair, and seeing men in ordinary coats and trousers and hard black hats, struck me with all the charm of the unexpected. I felt the sensation of a Robinson Crusoe transplanted suddenly from his desert island and set down in the Hôtel Bristol.