sweep of tilled land rise at intervals the spires of rare
villages, round which scattered houses and gardens of the Bavarian
sort--broad-eaved, flat-roofed, gay with flowers--are gathered. But for
these few human groups there is no break in the general aspect of the
quite open fields.

As might be expected, an interrupted chain of such villages marks the line
of the great river from Donauwoerth to Ulm, each standing just on the bank
and edge of what for long was the flood-ground of the Danube, and is still
in part unreclaimed marsh and water meadow. Each is distant a mile or two
from its next fellow. Thus, nearest Donauwoerth we have Muenster, upon which
the left of the allied army reposed when it lay in camp before the battle.
Next in order come Tapfheim and Schwenningen, through which that army
marched to the field. Further up-stream another group stretches beyond the
Nebel, the hamlet of Sonderheim, the little town of Hochstadt, the village
of Steinheim, etc.; and, in the middle of this line, at the point where
the Nebel falls into the old bed of the Danube, is built that large
village of _Blindheim_, which, under its English form of BLENHEIM, has
given the action the name it bears in this country.

I say "the old bed of the Danube," for one feature, and one alone, in that
countryside has changed in the two hundred years, though the change is not
one which the eye can note as it surveys the plain, nor one which greatly
affects the story of the action. This change is due to the straightening
of the bed of the great river.

At the time when Blenheim was fought, the Danube wound in great loops,
with numerous islands and backwaters complicating its course, and swung
back and forth among the level swamps of its valley. It runs to-day in an
artificial channel, which takes the average, as it were, of these
variations, drains the flood-ground, and leaves the old bed in the form of
stagnant, abandoned lengths of water or reeds, in which the traveller can
trace the former vagaries of the river. Thus Blindheim, which stood just
above the broad and hurrying water at the summit of one such loop, is now
800 yards away from the artificial trench which modern engineering has dug
for the river. But the new channel has no effect upon the landscape to the
eye. The floor on which the Danube runs is still a mass of undergrowth and
weeds and grass, which marks off the cultivated land on the south, as it
has been limited since men first