We cooked a most elaborate breakfast, made our farewell camp toilet before the nickle-plated rudder which served us as a mirror, and then parted with everything but our raiment among the sailors, who had been interested but shy spectators of all these operations. The wind was blowing half a gale, but with plenty of daylight before us we had no hesitation in tempting the dangers of the Black Sea, and about the middle of the forenoon left the cheery company happy in the possession of all our pots and pans, and set out in the direction of Sulina. The sailors assured us that we would not be able for several days to enter the river on account of the breakers running at the bar, but we proposed to skirt the coast as far as we could go, and then see what would turn up. We worked our way out of the tangle of reeds and across the shallows into the open water and turned our bows to the southward, where a long sand-beach stretched away in a graceful curve. A double line of breakers followed the [Illustration: BY THE BLACK SEA] shore, and we could see the white water on the bar beyond the light-house. We paddled on for several miles in the trough of the sea, dodging the waves and escaping capsize only by careful steering. We thought it useless to venture out into the roadstead, but kept along near the shore, and when we found the waves were rising to a height which made further advance foolhardy, we ran the canoes ashore through the surf and hauled them up on the beach just under the sand-dunes--the ideal camp-ground of our imaginations. We were not in sight of any house, and as we could not paddle any farther, it looked as if we might enjoy our sea-shore camp after all. However, on reconnoitring from the top of one of the dunes, we saw an ox-cart slowly moving across the meadow a half-mile or more away, and ran and overtook it. The driver was a fine, tall young Roumanian farmer, with an intelligent, handsome face, and he consented to carry the canoes to the Sulina branch for us. He had an excellent cart and two yoke of oxen, and there was an easy road along the hard beach. On the firm white sand, under a brilliant noonday sun, and in full view of the great blue expanse of the Black Sea, we dismantled the canoes and lashed them on the ox-cart, one above the other. After a couple of hours’ walk along the beach in the very wash of the waves, we came to the north bank of the Sulina arm opposite the town. Here we slid the canoes into the stream, took our last paddle across the Danube, and deposited them in the warehouse of a hospitable friend to await shipment to England. We then and there compared notes, and agreed we had only two things to regret in our whole trip: one that we did not launch the canoes at Villingen, fifteen miles above Donaueschingen, and the other that we did not have our camp on the sands of the Black Sea. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Danube, by F. D. Millet