I wish our way had always lain among woods.  Trees are the most civil society.  An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and death, like you and me:  is not that in itself a speaking lesson in history?  But acres on acres full of such patriarchs contiguously rooted, their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart younglings pushing up about their knees:  a whole forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air:  what is this but the most imposing piece in nature’s repertory?  Heine wished to lie like Merlin under the oaks of Broceliande.  I should not be satisfied with one tree; but if the wood grew together like a banyan grove, I would be buried under the tap-root of the whole; my parts should circulate from oak to oak; and my consciousness should be diffused abroad in all the forest, and give a common heart to that assembly of green spires, so that it also might rejoice in its own loveliness and dignity.  I think I feel a thousand squirrels leaping from bough to bough in my vast mausoleum; and the birds and the winds merrily coursing over its uneven, leafy surface.

Alas! the forest of Mormal is only a little bit of a wood, and it was but for a little way that we skirted by its boundaries.  And the rest of the time the rain kept coming in squirts and the wind in squalls, until one’s heart grew weary of such fitful, scolding weather.  It was odd how the showers began when we had to carry the boats over a lock, and must expose our legs.  They always did.  This is a sort of thing that readily begets a personal feeling against nature.  There seems no reason why the shower should not come five minutes before or five minutes after, unless you suppose an intention to affront you.  The Cigarette had a mackintosh which put him more or less above these contrarieties.  But I had to bear the brunt uncovered.  I began to remember that nature was a woman.  My companion, in a rosier temper, listened with great satisfaction to my Jeremiads, and ironically concurred.  He instanced, as a cognate matter, the action of the tides, ‘which,’ said he, ’was altogether designed for the confusion of canoeists, except in so far as it was calculated to minister to a barren vanity on the part of the moon.’

At the last lock, some little way out of Landrecies, I refused to go any farther; and sat in a drift of rain by the side of the bank, to have a reviving pipe.  A vivacious old man, whom I take to have been the devil, drew near and questioned me about our journey.  In the fulness of my heart, I laid bare our plans before him.  He said it was the silliest enterprise that ever he heard of.  Why, did I not know, he asked me, that it was nothing but locks, locks, locks, the whole way? not to mention that, at this season of the year, we should find the Oise quite