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 enriches irresponsible youth in its commerce with the world.  The river bends sharply to the left under a prodigious cliff, where is some ancient castle or religious house.  There he stands, excellent fellow, forever (in our memory) holding that blue mug against a Maxfield Parrish scene.

Just around that bend, if you are discreet, a bathe can be accomplished, and you will reach the Lion by supper time, vowing the Danube the loveliest of all streams.

Of the Lion itself, now that we compress the gland of memory more closely, we have little to report save a general sensation of cheerful comfort.  That in itself is favourable:  the bad inns are always accurately tabled in mind.  But stay—­here is a picture that unexpectedly presents itself.  On that evening (it was July 15, 1912) there was a glorious little girl, about ten years old, taking supper at the Lion with her parents.  Through the yellow shine of the lamps she suddenly reappears to us, across the dining room—­rather a more luxurious dining room than the two wayfarers were accustomed to visit.  We can see her straight white frock, her plump brown legs in socks (not reaching the floor as she sat), her tawny golden hair with a red ribbon.  The two dusty vagabonds watched her, and her important-looking adults, from afar.  We have only the vaguest impression of her father:  he was erect and handsome and not untouched with pride. (Heavens, were they some minor offshoot of the Hohenzollern tribe?) We can see the head waiter smirking near their table.  Across nine years and thousands of miles they still radiate to us a faint sense of prosperity and breeding; and the child was like a princess in a fairy-tale.  Ah, if only it had all been a fairy-tale.  Could we but turn back the clock to that summer evening when the dim pine-alleys smelled so resinous on the Muehlberg, turn back the flow of that quick blue river, turn back history itself and rewrite it in chapters fit for the clear eyes of that child we saw.