OLD MOSQUE, RUSTCHUK
cheery and more or less communicative, and we heard singing, laughter, and constant merry chatter among the people as we passed. But in Bulgaria these cheerful sounds no longer came to our ears; villages near the river were as silent as the grave; the peasants at the landing-places stared at us stupidly as we went along, and no one ever hailed us pleasantly or showed any intelligent interest in our fleet.
BULGARIAN BUFFALO CART
Russian monuments are seen on several hills between Sistova and Rustchuk, about thirty-five miles below, and scarcely a mile of the river but has some interesting history in connection with the struggle along the Danube in the early part of the summer campaign in 1877. By a curious coincidence, we happened to camp the afternoon we left Sistova near the very place where, fourteen years before, on the same date, the writer had crossed the river at the end of a long courier’s ride, described in the pages of Harper’s Magazine not long since. It is not strange, therefore, that as we paddled down the beautiful calm reach the following morning the familiar lines of the landscape stimulated a flow of reminiscences of the campaign. Nearing Pyrgos, and in sight of the monument on one of the great rounded hills where the battle was fought in which young Sergius Leuchtenberg, the cousin of the present Czar, was killed, we were startled by the unmistakable sound of the grunt of a Gatling-gun and the rattle of small-arms. We could not at first believe our ears, each of us thinking this dramatic and suggestive accompaniment to the tales of the war was a mental distortion of ordinary noises brought about by our preoccupation with the subject. However, as we paddled along, increasing our stroke in our growing excitement, we discovered that the sounds came from the hills near Rustchuk, and although we could see no smoke, we could accurately distinguish the reports of rifles in irregular scattering succession, like the prelude of a great battle. Our mystification increased with every moment, and we hastened on past the low willow-fringed shores on the Roumanian side, studying the rocky bluffs across the river and the billowy summits of the bare hills to find a solution of the enigma. The sounds ceased as suddenly as they began, and as we rounded a wide bend full of islands, and came in sight of the minarets of Rustchuk and the great buildings in Giurgevo on the low hills far across the marshes opposite, we met a small Bulgarian gunboat with a machine-gun at the bow and discovered at the same time, on a broad plateau under the old Turkish redoubt back of the town, the summer encampment of the garrison. What we had heard was, undoubtedly, the morning target practice on land and the trial of the machine-gun on the river.