The river transit was a long day's journey, made all the longer by the necessity of transshipment into a smaller boat in order to pass the rapids at the Iron Gates. As a rule you reached Rustschuk too late to proceed the same night to Varna. Next morning you traversed Bulgaria by rail and embarked in the evening at Varna on the steamboat, which, if the weather was favorable, landed you next day at Constantinople. At the time I am speaking of, this route, circuitous and incon-venient as it was, formed the chief channel of communication between the East and the West; and Rustschuk profited greatly by the traffic which the new route brought into the little Bulgarian village.

With the opening of the Orient Railway the Varna-Rustschuk line saw the last of its short-lived importance. To some small extent the route may still be used by travellers to the Bosphorus from Romania or Russia, but even in their case the Belgrade- Sofia-Constantinople line is the most convenient, though the longest in actual distance. Practically, the traffic which first made Rustschuk a place of importance is at an end, and though it is possible the construction of the proposed line from Sofia to Shumla may ultimately make Rustschuk a station on the main route between the West and the iEgean Sea, this is all in the future, and an uncertain future, too, into the bargain.

Between Galatz and Pesth

I expected, therefore, to find Rustschuk bearing the familiar aspect of a place which was once of importance as a centre of traffic, but which has ceased to be so when its reason of being was withdrawn, owing to the traffic having shifted elsewhere. This expectation was confirmed when, instead of the multitude of passengers of all nationalties whom I recollect on board the vessel which had landed me at Rustschuk in 1869, I found myself almost the sole passenger in the heavy, freight-laden steamer of the Danubian Company, plying between Galatz and Pesth, which carried me across the river from Giurgevo in Romania to Rustschuk in Bulgaria. During the brief transit, we passed in mid-stream the half-sunken hull of a Turkish ironclad, which had been blown up by the Russians when they bombarded Rustschuk. No attempt had been made to raise the hull, and an island was forming rapidly around it by the silt of the river.

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