"I had a great deal of healthy pleasure from their manœuvres, and took care to miss as few performances as possible; and I found that even the 'Cigarette,' while he pretended to despise my enthusiasm, was more or less a devotee himself. There is something highly absurd in the exposition of such toys to the outrages of winter on a housetop. They would be more in keeping in a glass case before a Nürnberg clock. Above all, at night, when the children are abed, and even grown people are snoring under quilts, does it not seem impertinent to leave these ginger-bread figures winking and tinkling to the stars and the rolling moon? The gargoyles may, fitly enough, twist their ape-like heads; fitly enough may the potentate bestride his charger, like a centurion in an old German print of the Via Dolorosa; but the toys should be put away in a box among some cotton, until the sun rises, and the children are abroad again to be amused."
COMPIÈGNE TOWN HALL
"My great delight in Compiègne was the Town Hall."—R. L. S.
XIX.
There is but little interest in the remaining stages of Stevenson's journey; not because the towns through which the canoeists now passed are less worthy of note than any already described, but for the ample reason that R. L. S. had, in some measure, lost his earlier delight in the voyage. He pretends that on the broading bosom of the Oise the canoes were now so far away from the life along the riverside, that they had slipped out of touch with rural folk and rural ways. But this is not strictly true, when we know that the river, as far as Pontoise, is seldom greatly wider than the canals on which the Arethusa and the Cigarette had set out with high hopes of adventure a fortnight before. The towns are quaint and sleepy. The voyagers were nearing the end, the river ran smooth, the sky was bright, and a packet of letters at Compiègne had set them dreaming of home. Here was the secret; the spell was broken; their appetite for adventure had been slaked; every mile of easy-flowing water was taking them not away to unknown things, but homeward to familiar ones.
Pont Sainte Maxence, the end of their first stage below Compiègne, is a featureless little town, the Oise making a brave show through the centre of it, and I do not suspect its church of any stirring history. R. L. S. found its interior "positively arctic to the eye." It was here he noticed the withered old woman making her orisons before all the shrines; "like a prudent capitalist with a somewhat cynical view of the commercial prospect, she desired to place her supplications in a great variety of heavenly securities." I passed through Creil and Précy in the afternoon, following close to the river, which now skirts a country of gentle hills on the east, but westward fringes a vast level plain, with nothing but groves of poplar to break the line of the distant horizon.
XX.
In the gloaming I arrived at Pontoise, where I was told a fête was in progress; but the only signs of hilarity were two booths for the sale of pastries and sweet stuffs on the square in front of the station, and one small boy investing two sous in a greasy-looking puff. The rues of Pontoise have high-sounding names, but they are dull beyond words, though only eighteen miles away the "great sinful streets" of Paris are gleaming with their myriad lights.