In one of the adjoining Departments, according to this publication, it appears that there are about a hundred suicides in the year among a population of half a million. Surely this is an alarming proportion; and what should we say if Manchester had to report 100 men and women in one year who put themselves to death?
But we are subsiding, you see, into the ordinary tales of a traveller, because I am waiting now for the train and the Rob Roy, and certainly this my only experience of widowerhood made me long again for the well-known yellow oaken side of the boat and her pink-brown cedar varnished top.
Well, next morning here is the canoe at Epernay, arrived all safe at a cost of 2s. 6d. All safe we thought at first, but we soon found it had been sadly bruised, and would surely leak. I turned it upside down on the railway platform in the hot sun, and bought two candles and occupied three good hours in making repairs and greasing all the seams. But after all this trouble, when we put the boat into the Marne, the water oozed in all round.
It is humiliating to sit in a leaky boat—it is like a lame horse or a crooked gun; of all the needful qualities of a boat the first is to keep out the water. So I stopped at the first village, and got a man to mix white lead and other things, and we carefully worked this into all the seams, leaving it to harden while I had my breakfast in the little auberge close by the shore, where they are making the long rafts to go down to Paris, and where hot farmers come to sip their two-penny bottle of wine.
The raft man was wonderfully proud of his performance with the canoe, and he called out to each of his friends as they walked past, to give them its long history in short words. When I paid him at last, he said he hoped I would never forget that the canoe had been thoroughly mended in the middle of France, at the village of ——, but I really do not remember the name.
However, there were not wanting tests of his workmanship, for the Rob Roy had to be pulled over many dykes and barriers on the Marne. Some of these were of a peculiar construction, and were evidently novel in design.
A "barrage" reached across the stream, and there were three steps or falls on it, with a plateau between each. The water ran over these steps, and was sometimes only a few inches in depth on the crest of each fall, where it had to descend some eight or ten inches at most.
This, of course, would have been easy enough for the canoe to pass, but then a line of iron posts was ranged along each plateau, and chains were tied from the top of one post to the bottom of another, diagonally, and it will be understood that this was a very puzzling arrangement to steer through in a fast current.
In cases of this sort I usually got ashore to reconnoitre, and having calculated the angle at which we must enter the passage obliquely (down a fall, and across its stream), I managed to get successfully through several of these strange barriers. We came at length to one which, on examination, I had to acknowledge was "impassable," for the chains were slack, and there was only an inch or two of "law" on either side of the difficult course through them.
