Cruise Across Europe. By Donald Maxwell. (John Lane. 10e. 6d.)—Mr.
Maxwell and the companion of his voyage did their best to confirm the opinion common on the Continent of an Englishman's mental condition. They took their little craft, the 'Walrus,' to Willemstad in January and made their way through the floating ice in the harbour. The police supposed them to be spies—what, we wonder, would arouse a suspicion of this kind in our police F—communicated with the Government, and actually arrested them. This difficulty, however, was got over— it is scarcely from England that danger to Dutch independence will arise—and the ' Walrus ' started on its voyage. It ascended the Rhine by help of a barge, a luxuriously equipped vessel very 'different from what we know by the name. When this help came to an end, a most laborious system of towing had to be used. At Mainz the Rhine was quitted for the Main, where the same methods of progression were followed. But the romance of the expedition began at Bamberg. Here the Ludwig Canal, which joins the Regnitz, an affluent of the Main, with the Altmal, a tributary of the Danube, begins. This water- way, begun by Charlemagne, ascends and descends by means of a hundred locks a height of fifteen hundred feet above the sea. Mr. Maxwell's account of this curious experience must be quoted— The valley gradually appeared through rifts in the fast dissolving cloud. Perhaps no more extraordinary view has ever been seen from the deck.of a sailing boat. The 'Walrus' might have been a balloon anchored to the mountain side, for she looked down from a giddy height above the undulating country that stretched away Inindreds of feet below. Roofs of villages glittered in the distance. A stream flashed back the yellow light of tho eastern sky, and wandered like a fiery thread through field and forest." The charge for passage through the hundred locks was sir shillings. The voyage up the Thames, though it cannot boast as many locks, would cost that several times over. And the lock-keepers could not even understand what a " tip " meant. Finally, our travellers reached the Black Sea, after an adventurous descent of the Danube in flood. The narrative is certainly worth reading. It is well Illustrated.
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