d the smell of pine trees and a great warm wind
that had buffeted us all day. But we have a dim, comfortable
remembrance of a large clean bedroom, unlighted, in which we duskily
groped and found no less than three huge beds among which we had to
choose; and we can see also a dining room brilliantly papered in
scarlet, with good old prints on the walls and great wooden beams
overhead. Two bottles of ice-cold beer linger in our thought: and
there was some excellent work done on a large pancake, one of those
durable fleshy German _Pfannkuchen_. For the odd part of it was
(unless our memory is wholly amiss) Montjoie was then (1912)
supposed to be part of Germany, and they pronounced it Mon-yowey.
But the Reich must have felt that this was not permanent, for they
had not Germanized either the name of the town or of the hostelry.

And let us add, in this affectionate summary, _The Lion_--(_Hotel
zum Loewen_)--at Sigmaringen, that delicious little haunt on the
upper Danube, where the castle sits on a stony jut overlooking the
river. Algernon Blackwood, in one of his superb tales of fantasy (in
the volume called "The Listener") has told a fascinating gruesome
story of the Danube, describing a sedgy, sandy, desolate region
below the Hungarian border where malevolent inhuman forces were
apparent and resented mortal intrusion. But we cannot testify to
anything sinister in the bright water of the Danube in the flow of
its lovely youth, above Sigmaringen. And if there were any evil
influences, surely at Sigmaringen (the ancient home and origin of
the Hohenzollerns, we believe) they would have shown themselves. In
those exhilarating miles of valley, bicycled in company with a
blithe vagabond who is now a professor at Cornell, we learned why
the waltz was called "The Blue Danube." So heavenly a tint of
transparent blue-green we have never seen elsewhere, the hurrying
current sliding under steep crags of gray and yellow stone, whitened
upon sudden shallows into long terraces of broken water. There was a
wayside chapel with painted frescoes and Latin inscriptions (why
didn't we make a note of them, we wonder?) and before it a cold gush
sluicing from a lion's mouth into a stone basin. A blue crockery mug
stood on the rim, and the bowl was spotted with floating petals from
pink and white rose-bushes. We can still see our companion, tilting
a thirsty bearded face as he drank, outlined on such a backdrop of
pure romantic beauty as only enr