It was a steaming hot day in August when our Canadian canoe slid up alongside the wharf of a Danube Rowing Club in Buda-Pesth, and we got out to stretch our legs and look about for a hotel. This was not easy, because of our savage and unkempt appearance, and our microscopic amount of luggage. Six weeks before, we had launched the canoe at the source of the Danube, in the Black Forest, nearly a thousand miles away, and had been travelling in her ever since, sleeping at night in a gipsy tent on the shore or on the islands in the river, wherever we happened to be towards sunset; cooking our own meals, fishing, bathing, upsetting, shooting rapids, taking photographs, exploring quaint villages, and wandering inland wherever attraction offered. In a word, we had been thoroughly enjoying the ever-changing scenery of the countries we had passed through⁠—as the Danube rolled on, growing every day wider, swifter, and deeper⁠—Baden, Würtemberg, and Bavaria, Austria and Hungary. As may be imagined, therefore, our connection with the proverbial bandbox was not discernible at first sight by the time we reached Buda-Pesth, for the sun had tanned us a deep red-brown, and the Danube mud had not failed to add the finishing touches of its more delicate tints. We had a suit of flannel for work, and a suit of cloth, plus a celluloid collar each, for the towns, the size of the canoe⁠—after tent, blankets, and cooking apparatus were in⁠—making further wardrobe impossible. So that, when we tied up at the first little wharf we came to on the right bank and searched the heights of Pesth on one side and the streets of Buda on the other, for a hotel, we did so with no exuberant confidence in the nature of our reception. Then, as we stood trespassing on the floating wharf, a man came lazily out of the boat-house into the fierce sunshine and prepared to lower an outrigger into the current. He was dressed in rowing things, and, after a momentary inspection (its brevity, we thought, did him infinite credit), raised his cap to us, and made a polite little bow. We at once hastened to explain our position to him in German and, to our delight, the gentleman replied with the greatest courtesy in excellent English. “If you will allow us to take care of your canoe for you during your stay in our city, we shall be very pleased; and if you will come tonight to our club dinner and meet the directors, I have no doubt they will invite you to make the Club your hotel.” And here was sounded the note of that delightful Hungarian hospitality which never ceased to ring in our ears, from morning till night, so long as we were sojourners in the land of the Magyars. It was the Hunnia Rowing Club to which our good angel had directed us, and we were at once made to feel as specially privileged Hunnia members. They housed, mended, and varnished our battered canoe; they dined us and lunched us; they showed us the town in all its aspects, the views from the heights and from the bridges, the things worth seeing in the galleries and churches and other places too picturesque to mention; they introduced us to the national dishes in queer little out-of-the-way restaurants, undiscoverable by strangers, and led us in the cool of the evening to the pleasant groves of St. Margaret’s Isle, where gipsy bands discoursed Hungarian music, with ravishing effect, into the sma’ wee hours. And the night before we left, a crew of eight took us in a racing shell at midnight, with the swirling current, under the four bridges, and then carried us more slowly up stream again, while the moon rose behind the hundred towers of the Parliament buildings, and shed a silver mist over the hurrying river and the sleeping city on the heights above. It was a memorable occasion, as the historians say. But even Buda-Pesth became wearisome after a time. Our tent had been patched up and our cooking pots secured, and one day we left the friendly rowing club behind us and took the train inland to the Platten See, whither the mended canoe had preceded us by freight. The Hungarian name for this lake is Balatontó (tó meaning lake), and many of the villages along its shores have Balaton for a prefix. It is a curious body of water, fifty miles long, from two to five miles wide, with warm yellowish waves, and nowhere over thirty feet deep. It has no islands. The south shore is flat, hot, and sandy, but the line on the northern side is diversified with deep bays and bold promontories, and the mountains rise pieturesquely to a considerable height. Their volcanic origin is plainly seen in the truncated coves which rise here and there in a series of vigorous landmarks.