The whole establishment of the "Grand Cerf" accompanied the canoeists to the water's edge when they were ready to take their leave. Madame Bonnaire, however, has quite forgotten that exciting episode of her middle life; but there, we have Stevenson's word for it, and the good woman must accept the fame. The day was a dismal one, we are told—wind and rain, and "a stretch of blighted country" to pass through. I heartily wished for a speedy end to that same stretch. For six or seven miles the road is lined with factories and dirty cottages, while dirty electric cars rattle along, well-laden with passengers, for here France is at work and grimy; here is the France of which the tourist along the beaten tracks has no notion. A stout gentleman with whom I conversed by the wayside was very proud of the varied industries of the district. "Look you; we have glass works, pottery works, iron foundries, engine works, copper, and many other industries in the neighbourhood." Still, I was glad when, a mile or two beyond Hautmont, I found myself outside this region of smoke and growling factories and advancing into a pleasant pastoral country, the river only a little way from the road. Stevenson's word picture of the scene is photographic in its accuracy, but his art environs it with that ethereal touch the old engravers could give to a landscape, an art that has been lost to us by the vogue of cheap modern "processes."
"After Hautmont," he writes, "the sun came forth again and the wind went down; and a little paddling took us beyond the ironworks and through a delectable land. The river wound among low hills, so that sometimes the sun was at our backs, and sometimes it stood right ahead, and the river before us was one sheet of intolerable glory. On either hand, meadows and orchards bordered, with a margin of sedge and water-flowers, upon the river. The hedges were of a great height, woven about the trunks of hedgerow elms; and the fields, as they were often small, looked like a series of bowers along the stream. There was never any prospect; sometimes a hill-top with its trees would look over the nearest hedgerow, just to make a middle distance for the sky; but that was all. The heaven was bare of clouds.... The river doubled among the hillocks, a shining strip of mirror glass; and the dip of the paddles set the flowers shaking along the brink."
In this land of many waters every male creature seems to be a disciple of Sir Isaak Walton. A prodigious number of anglers will be encountered; I must have seen hundreds. Every day and all day they are dotted along the canals and rivers as patient as posts, and apparently as profitably employed. It was a continual wonder to me how they could spare the time; and a pleasure also, for it is cheering to know that so many fellow-creatures can afford to take life so leisurely, and that the factory may whistle and the surburban train shriek laden to the town without causing them to turn a hair. "They seem stupefied with contentment," says R. L. S. in a fine passage, "and when we induced them to exchange a few words with us about the weather, their voices sounded quiet and far away."
VIII.
At the little hamlet of Quartes, "with its church and bickering windmill"—the latter gone these many years—the canoeists went in search of a lodging for the night, but had to trudge with their packs to the neighbouring village of Pont sur Sambre for accommodation. They would have fared better at Quartes to-day, as there is now a clean little auberge hard by the bridge, kept by a jovial fellow, who told me that his son had taken up photography, with deplorable results. "He takes my photograph, I assure you, M'sieu, and makes me look like a corpse in the Morgue"—and the landlord would laugh and show two rows of dusky teeth beneath his wiry moustache—"and when I say I'm not so awful as that, he will say that now I see myself as I really am, for, look you, the camera must tell the truth." He laughs again, and rising, says: "But come with me here," throwing open the door of a private room. "Now there's a portrait I had done in Brussels, and I'm really a decent-looking chap in that. So I say to my son, whenever he makes a new and worse picture of me: 'There's your papa to the life, done by a real photographer.'"
ON THE SAMBRE AT QUARTES
