sants and
their wives trundle thousands of barrows of coal along the swinging
planks. Here is raw life, lusty, full of rude beauty, but utterly
incult. The men and women appear to be merely animals gifted with
speech. The women wear almost no clothing: their matted hair drops
about their shapely shoulders as they toil at their burden, singing
meanwhile some merry chorus. Little tenderness is bestowed on these
creatures, and it was not without a slight twinge of the nerves that
I saw the huge, burly master of the boat's crew now and then bestow a
ringing slap with his open hand upon the neck or cheek of one of the
poor women who stumbled with her load or who hesitated for a moment to
indulge in abuse of a comrade. As the boat moved away these people,
dancing about the heaps of coal in the torchlight, looked not unlike
demons disporting in some gruesome nook of Enchanted Land. When they
were gypsies they did not need the aid of the torches: they were
sufficiently demoniacal without artificial aid.

Kalafat and Turnu-Severinu are small towns which would never have been
much heard of had they not been in the region visited by the war.
Turnu-Severinu is noted, however, as the point where Severinus once
built a mighty tower; and not far from the little hamlet may still
be seen the ruins of Trajan's immemorial bridge. Where the Danube is
twelve hundred yards wide and nearly twenty feet deep, Apollodorus
of Damascus did not hesitate, at Trajan's command, to undertake the
construction of a bridge with twenty stone and wooden arches. He
builded well, for one or two of the stone piers still remain perfect
after a lapse of sixteen centuries, and eleven of them, more or less
ruined, are yet visible at low water. Apollodorus was a man of genius,
as his other work, the Trajan Column, proudly standing in Rome, amply
testifies. No doubt he was richly rewarded by Trajan for constructing
a work which, flanked as it was by noble fortifications, bound the
newly-captured Dacian colony to the Roman empire. What mighty men were
these Romans, who carved their way along the Danube banks, hewing
roads and levelling mountains at the same time that they engaged the
savages of the locality in daily battle! There were indeed giants in
those days.

[Illustration: RUSTCHUK.]

When Ada-Kale is passed, and pretty Orsova, lying in slumbrous quiet
at the foot of noble mountains, is reached, the last trace of Turkish
domination is left behind. In future