CURRENT MILLS
beyond the rough bough shelter at the door of the cellar announced to the river men that wine was for sale. Our old friends the current mills still clustered at frequent intervals, where the stream ran the swiftest. Since the first time we saw them—far up the river, above Vienna—they had not changed their general shape or construction; but the owners’ names, painted in large white letters on the sides, had marked with accuracy the limits of the different nationalities we had passed in our journey. Now, before the curious combinations of letters on the mills near the Hungarian shore had ceased to puzzle us, Croatian and Slavonian names in a new and unfamiliar alphabet stared at us from the weather-stained sides of the mills along the opposite bank, and something of the crudity of Oriental taste was seen in the unskilful attempts to decorate the wood-work near the door and window. From the right bank we heard hails in an unknown language, and by the water’s edge saw peasants with fiercer mustaches than even the Magyar boasts, and women of a heavy, unsympathetic type. The costume, too, had undergone a decided change. Both men and women wore clumsy wrappings around the ankles, and uncouth sandals and shoes. The loose trousers of the men were strapped to the calf by the thongs which bound the thick woollen cloths or coarse socks to the ankles, and red sashes took the place of belts. Servia was beginning to show herself to us long before we reached the political frontier.
CHAPTER XII
E 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.
The heat was intense and the streets almost deserted as we paddled away directly after mid-day, and floated down past great bluffs, with hot gullies filled with herds of swine seeking to avoid the heat by frequent baths, and scarcely distinguishable in color from the baked mud on which they slept. Late in the day, having joined company with some lumber rafts we had been passing and repassing for the last day or two, we drew up the canoes on a pleasant park-like meadow, only a foot or two above the water, with great trees and firmer turf than we had seen for a long time. The rafts tied up to the shore just above us, and the smoke of our several camp-fires soon curled up among the trees, and floated away in the clear air of the perfect summer evening. Our first visitor was a Croatian, who, having served in the Austrian army, had learned a little German, and was only too anxious to air his knowledge. He prepared us for the visit of a band of gypsies who were camping in the vicinity, cautioned us to watch all our loose articles, and loudly sang the praises of one of the gypsy women but lately married,
VUKOVÁR WATERMELONS
who, he declared, was as beautiful as a queen—probably meaning the Queen of Servia. To be sure, the next morning, shortly after dawn, a motley crowd straggled up to our encampment, among them the gypsy belle, with the bearing