Under the very wall of the inn-yard the Brigach, now quite a river and much swollen by the floods, rushed and foamed and filled the air with an inviting murmur. Donaueschingen has long been the starting-point for boating expeditions to Vienna, but, as we rightly conjectured, no craft similar to the American cruising canoe had ever before been seen there. Curiosity to examine the novelties, coupled with the knowledge of our plan to cruise as far as the Black Sea, which had been widely disseminated by our advance agent in his brief stay, made a ripple of excitement all over the town, and the inn-yard was constantly crowded with visitors, many of them skilled mechanics, for the neighborhood is widely famous for its clocks and wood-carvings. Only one of us, as I have already confessed, was acquainted with a canoe of this kind, but we were all experienced in the management of birch-barks and Canadians and other small craft. We effectually concealed our ignorance from the spectators, however, and in the guise of testing the apparatus after its long journey, worked the sails, rudder, and centre-board, set up the tents, shipped and unshipped the hatches, until we became quite familiar with the working of them all. It may be as well at the beginning to show the result of our examination of the canoes and to describe them briefly, for the reason that our adventures will be better appreciated and our river life better understood if some adequate notion can be given of the craft that carried us by day and housed us for the night for three happy months. [Illustration: THE SKETCH-BOOK]