Leland Stanford, Jr. Papers

a delightful time. Three mornings in succession we took gondolas and hired a boat load of singers and went down to the Rialto to hear them sing. We spent Christmas in Vienna staying there altogether ten days, going to the Opera almost every evening and seeing one of the best Opera company's and Ballets in the world. At Bucharest we spent New Year's day starting on the fifth of January at five in the morning for Varna reaching the Danube at about five at a place called Giurgevo (you must know that for 10 days every thing had been blocked with snow) there we took sleighs and drove over the ice to a small island where two open boats were waiting to take the passengers across the river between the floating ice for about a mile where at Roustohouk the train for Varna was waiting