The banks were now dotted with villas, and numerous pleasure-boats were moored at neat little stairs. The vast number of these boats quite astonished me, and the more so as very few of them were ever to be seen in actual use.
The French are certainly ingenious in their boat-making, but more of ingenuity than of practical exercise is seen on the water. On several rivers we remarked the "walking machine," in which a man can walk on the water by fixing two small boats on his feet. A curious mode of rowing with your face to the bows has lately been invented by a Frenchman, and it is described in the [Appendix].
We stopped to breakfast at a new canal cutting, and as there were many gamins about, I fastened a stone to my painter and took the boat out into the middle of the river, and so left her moored within sight of the arbour, where I sat, and also within sight of the ardent-eyed boys who gazed for hours with wistful looks on the tiny craft and its fluttering flag. Their desire to handle as well as to see is only natural for these little fellows, and, therefore, if the lads behave well, I always make a point of showing them the whole affair quite near, after they have had to abstain from it so long as a forbidden pleasure.
Strange that this quick curiosity of French boys does not ripen more of them into travellers, but it soon gets expended in trifling details of a narrow circle, while the sober, sedate, nay, the triste, Anglian is found scurrying over the world with a carpet-bag, and pushing his way in foreign crowds without one word of their language, and all the while as merry as a lark. Among the odd modes of locomotion adopted by Englishmen, we have already mentioned that of the gentleman travelling in Germany with a four-in-hand and two spare horses. We met another Briton who had made a tour in a road locomotive which he bought for 700l., and sold again at the same price. One more John Bull, who regarded the canoe as a "queer conveyance," went himself abroad on a velocipede. None of these, however, could cross seas, lakes, and rivers like the canoe, which might be taken wherever a man could walk or a plank could swim.
It seemed contrary to nature that, after thus nearing pretty Paris, one's back was now to be turned upon it for hours in order to have a wide, vague, purposeless voyage into country parts. But the river willed it so; for here a great curve began and led off to the left, while the traffic of the Marne went straight through a canal to the right,—through a canal, and therefore I would not follow it there.
The river got less and less in volume; its water was used for the canal, and it could scarcely trickle, with its maimed strength, through a spacious sweep of real country life. Here we often got grounded, got entangled in long mossy weeds, got fastened in overhanging trees, and, in fact, suffered all the evils which the smallest brook had ever entailed, though this was a mighty river.
The bend was more and more inexplicable, as it turned more round and round, till my face was full in the sunlight at noon, and I saw that the course was now due south.
Rustics were there to look at me, and wondering herdsmen too, as if the boat was in mid Germany, instead of being close to Paris. Evidently boating men in that quarter never came here by the river, and the Rob Roy was a rara avis floating on a stream unused.
But the circle was rounded at last, as all circles are, however large they be; and we got back to the common route, to civilization, fishing men and fishing women, and on the broad Marne once more. So here I stopped a bit for a ponder.
And now we unmoor for the last time, and enter the Rob Roy for its final trip—the last few miles of the Marne, and of more than a thousand miles rowed and sailed since we started from England. I will not disguise my feeling of sadness then, and I wished that Paris was still another day distant.