I hired a truck from a woman and hired a man to drag it, and so took the boat to the best hotel, a fine large house, where they at once recognized the canoe, and seemed to know all about it from report.
The hotel porter delayed so long next morning to wheel the boat to the railway, that when we took her into the luggage office as usual and placed the boat on the counter with the trunks and band-boxes, the officials declined to put it in the train.
This was the first time it had been refused on a railroad, and I used every kind of persuasion, but in vain, and this being the first application of the kind on French soil we felt that difficulties were ahead, if this precedent was to hold good.
Subsequent experience showed that the French railways will not take a canoe as baggage; while the other seven or eight countries we had brought the boat through were all amenable to pressure on this point.
We had desired to go by the railway only a few miles, but it would have enabled me to avoid about fifty locks on the canal and thus have saved two tedious days. As, however, they would not take the boat in a passenger train we carried her back to the canal, and I determined to face the locks boldly, and to regard them as an exercise of patience and of the flexor muscles, as it happens sometimes one's walk is only "a constitutional."
The Superintendent of the Rhine and Rhone Canal was very civil, and endeavoured to give me the desirable information I required, but which he had not got, that is to say, the length, depth, and general character of the several rivers we proposed to navigate in connexion with streams less "canalizé," so I had to begin again as usual, without any knowledge of the way.
With rather an ill-tempered "adieu" to Mulhouse, the Rob Roy set off again on its voyage. The water assumed quite a new aspect, now that one must go by it, but it was not so much the water as the locks which were objectionable. For at each of these there is a certain form of operations to be gone through—all very trifling and without variety, yet requiring to be carefully performed, or you may have the boat injured, or a ducking for yourself.
When we get to a lock I have to draw to the bank, open my waterproof covering, put my package and paddle ashore, then step out and haul the boat out of the water. By this time two or three persons usually congregate. I select the most likely one, and ask him to help in such a persuasive but dignified manner that he feels it an honour to carry one end of the boat while I take the other, and so we put her in again above the barrier, and, if the man looks poor, I give him a few sous. At some of the locks they asked me for a "carte de permission," or pass for travelling on their canal, but I laughed the matter off, and when they pressed it with a "mais monsieur," I kept treating the proposal as a good joke, until the officials were fairly baffled and gave in. The fact is, we had got into the canal as one gets over the hedge on to a public road, and as I did not use any of the water in locks or any of the lock-keepers' time, and the "pass" was a mere form, price 5d., it was but reasonable to go unquestioned; and besides, this "carte" could not be obtained except at the beginning. Having set off late, we went on until about sunset, when the route suddenly passed into the river Ill, a long dull stream, which flows through the Vosges into the Rhine.
This stream was now quite stagnant, and a mere collection of pools covered by thick scum. It was therefore a great comfort to have only a short voyage upon it.
When the Rob Roy again entered the canal, an acquaintance was formed with a fine young lad, who was reading as he sauntered along. He was reading of canoe adventures in America, and so I got him to walk some miles beside me, and to help the boat over some locks, telling him he could thus see how different actual canoeing was from the book stories about it made up of romance! He was pining for some expansion of his sphere, and specially for foreign travel, and above all to see England.