Launching our boats unobserved on the river, we soon left Liege in the distance and braved the hot sun.
The pleasant companionship of two travellers, each quite free in his own boat, was very enjoyable. Sometimes we sailed, then paddled a mile or two, or joined to help the boats over a weir, or towed them along while we walked on the bank for a change.[III.]
Each of us took whichever side of the river pleased him best, and we talked across long acres of water between, to the evident surprise of sedate people on the banks, who often could see only one of the strange elocutionists, the other being hidden by bushes or tall sedge. When talking thus aloud had amplified into somewhat uproarious singing, the chorus was far more energetic than harmonious, but then the Briton is at once the most timid and shy of mortal travellers, and the most outré and singular when he chooses to be free.
The midday beams on a river in August are sure to conquer your fresh energies at last, and so we had to pull up at a village for bread and wine.
The moment I got into my boat again a shrill whining cry in the river attracted my attention, and it came from a poor little boy, who had somehow fallen into the water, and was now making his last faint efforts to cling to a great barge in the stream. Naturally I rushed over to save him, and my boat went so fast and so straight that its sharp prow caught the hapless urchin in the rear, and with such a pointed reminder too that he screamed and struggled and thus got safely on the barge, which was beyond his reach, until thus roughly but fortunately aided.
On most of the Belgian, German, and French rivers there are excellent floating baths, an obvious convenience which I do not recollect observing on a single river in Britain, though in summer we have quite as many bathers as there are abroad.
The floating baths consist of a wooden framework, say 100 feet long, moored in the stream, and through which the water runs freely, while a set of strong bars and chains and iron network forms a false bottom, shallow at one end and deeper at the other, so that the bather cannot be carried away by the current.
Round the sides there are bathing boxes and steps, ladders, and spring boards for the various degree of aquatic proficiency.
The youths and even the little boys on the Rhine are very good swimmers, and many of them dive well. Sometimes there is a ladies' bath of similar construction, from which a good deal of very lively noise may be heard when the fair bathers are in a talkative mood.
The soldiers at military stations near the rivers are marched down regularly to bathe, and one day we found a large number of young recruits assembled for their general dip.