and a vigorous current under the keel which gave an exhilarating sense of added strength, much like that felt when riding a spirited horse. Nothing more could be desired except, perhaps, unlimited time in which to enjoy such pleasant recreation. Haste was, indeed, a slight drawback to our enjoyment. We did not dare delay, for the season was already in its full prime, and we knew that the gales began in the lower river as early as the first week of September; besides, one of the party had only a limited number of weeks at his disposal. Under other circumstances we would have spent a day or more at Riedlingen, where we found most interesting architecture along the river-front and saw a party of nuns at work in a hay-field. We had a little more social success with them than we did with their coreligionists, the monks at Beuron, for they turned their great, cool, flapping head-dresses in our direction, and actually seemed temporarily interested in our canoes, and in us as well.
A threatening storm drove us to seek shelter at dinnertime in a rural gasthaus in a little priest-ridden hamlet where a morose landlady gave us excellent bread and milk in rude earthen bowls, and was prevailed upon to part with some of her store of fresh bread and eggs. The peasants came hurrying into the village to escape the rain, their creaking carts piled high with hay and the sturdy little horses white with sweat. It was a ready-made picture from “Hermann and Dorothea.” We had occasion to regret in the night that we had not brought our tents, for it rained steadily for hours, and the rubber blankets rigged on the paddles made an inefficient shelter against the driving storm. But we were none the worse the next morning, and as soon as the ring of scythes of the women mowing in the next field woke us from our sound sleep we were up, cooked breakfast, and were soon off down pleasant reaches with overhanging rocks and occasional ruins frowning down from the pinnacled crags.
Every mile or two we passed a village, each more picturesque than its neighbor, and all with sonorous names that suggest places of great importance—Rechtenstein, Obermarschthal, Munderkingen, Rottenacker. Each village had its weir and its mill, and sometimes two of them. Various accidents occurred, none of them of a startling nature, and none resulting in anything worse than temporary
CROSSING THE WEIR—ROTTENACKER
