[III.] Frequent trials afterwards convinced me that towing is only useful if you feel very cramped from sitting. And this constraint is felt less and less as you get accustomed to sit ten or twelve hours at a time. Experience enables you to make the seat perfectly comfortable, and on the better rivers you have so frequently to get out that any additional change is quite needless. Towing is slower progress than paddling, even when your arms are tired, though my canoe was so light to tow that for miles I have drawn it by my little finger on a canal.
[IV.] This is an exceptional case, and I wrote from England to thank the officer. It would be unreasonable again to expect any baggage to be thus favoured. A canoe is at best a clumsy inconvenience in the luggage-van, and no one can wonder that it is objected to. In France the railway fourgons are shorter than in other countries, and the officials there insisted on treating my canoe as merchandise. The instances given above show what occurred in Belgium and Holland. In Germany little difficulty was made about the boat as luggage. In Switzerland there was no objection raised, for was not I an English traveller? As for the English railway guards, they have the good sense to see that a long light article like a canoe can be readily carried on the top of a passenger carriage. Probably some distinct rules will be instituted by the railways in each country, when they are found to be liable to a nautical incursion, but after all one can very well arrange to walk or see sights now and then, while the boat travels slower by a goods-train.
[V.] The legend about Pilate extends over Germany and Italy. Even on the flanks of Stromboli there is a talus of the volcano which the people dare not approach, "because of Pontius Pilate."
[VI.] After trying various modes of securing the canoe in a springless cart for long journeys on rough and hilly roads, I am convinced that the best way is to fasten two ropes across the top of a long cart and let the boat lie on these, which will bear it like springs and so modify the jolts. The painter is then made fast fore and aft, so as to keep the boat from moving back and forward. All plans for using trusses of straw, &c., fail after a few miles of rolling gravel and coarse ruts.
[VII.] The old Roman Ister. The name Donau is pronounced "Doanou." Hilpert says, "Dönau allied to Dón and Düna (a river)." In Celtic Dune means "river," and Don means "brown," while "au" in German is "island" (like the English "eyot").
The other three rivers mentioned above, and depicted in the plan on the map with this book, seem to preserve traces of their Roman names. Thus the "Brigach" is the stream coming from the north where "Alt Breisach" now represents the Roman "Mons Brisiacus," while the "Brege" may be referred to "Brigantii," the people about the "Brigantinus Lacus," now the "Boden See" (Lake Constance), where also Bregentz now represents the Roman "Brigantius." The river Neckar was "Nicer" of old, and the Black Forest was "Hercynia Silva."
The reader being now sufficiently confused about the source of the Danube and its name, let us leave the Latin in the quagmire and jump nimbly into our canoe.
[VIII.] The best geographical books give different estimates of this, some above and others below the amount here stated.
[IX.] See sketch, ante, [page 49].
[X.] Two stimulants well known in England are much used in Germany,—tea and tobacco.