We had crossed the line of active melon consumption soon after leaving Budapest; we had for days revelled in a superabundance of them, and, indeed, had quite become accustomed to the sight of every human being, old and young, either carrying a melon or preoccupied with eating it. We had contributed our generous share to the flotsam of melon rinds which bobbed down the current, and had sampled every unfamiliar variety of the delicious fruit which had met our notice. It was chiefly, then, from the unæsthetic motives of appetite that we proposed to land at Vukovár, which had long been held up to us by melon-eaters as the one place on the Danube where the fruit was found in perfection. As we came near the town, remarkable mainly for a new synagogue of doubtful taste, we saw piles of huge round objects ranged along in the shade of small trees on the bank, like cannon-balls in an arsenal, and we needed no further identification of this metropolis of the melon trade. Our approach seemed to cause an unusual commotion at the landing, and we naturally attributed this to the activity among the merchants, induced by the arrival of possible purchasers of the abundant stock in hand. But we learned from a German-speaking policeman who met us as we went ashore that the market-women had taken our fleet for the torpedo-boats of which they had heard, and were in a great fright, believing we were about to attack the place. We begged him to assure them that we had no use for the town, but only for some of the projectiles we saw piled up there under the trees, and feminine terrors were slowly forgotten in the excitement of trade. Whoever has seen the Southern negro busy with a watermelon may be able to imagine our satisfaction at the quality of the fruit we found, and any one familiar with the capacity of a canoe may appreciate the size of the melons from the fact that we were unable to take in the monsters. But Vukovár is not all watermelons and timid market-women, as we found when we strolled up into the town, puzzled over the signs in the Cyrillic alphabet, and marvelled at the embroidered garments festooned at the shop doors, at the pretentious cafés, and the Franco-Italian architecture--the most imposing we had seen since leaving Budapest.