personally in the fray.  And still I held to my paddle.  At last I dragged myself on to my stomach on the trunk, and lay there a breathless sop, with a mingled sense of humour and injustice.  A poor figure I must have presented to Burns upon the hill-top with his team.  But there was the paddle in my hand.  On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these words inscribed:  ‘He clung to his paddle.’

The Cigarette had gone past a while before; for, as I might have observed, if I had been a little less pleased with the universe at the moment, there was a clear way round the tree-top at the farther side.  He had offered his services to haul me out, but as I was then already on my elbows, I had declined, and sent him down stream after the truant Arethusa.  The stream was too rapid for a man to mount with one canoe, let alone two, upon his hands.  So I crawled along the trunk to shore, and proceeded down the meadows by the river-side.  I was so cold that my heart was sore.  I had now an idea of my own why the reeds so bitterly shivered.  I could have given any of them a lesson.  The Cigarette remarked facetiously that he thought I was ‘taking exercise’ as I drew near, until he made out for certain that I was only twittering with cold.  I had a rub down with a towel, and donned a dry suit from the india-rubber bag.  But I was not my own man again for the rest of the voyage.  I had a queasy sense that I wore my last dry clothes upon my body.  The struggle had tired me; and perhaps, whether I knew it or not, I was a little dashed in spirit.  The devouring element in the universe had leaped out against me, in this green valley quickened by a running stream.  The bells were all very pretty in their way, but I had heard some of the hollow notes of Pan’s music.  Would the wicked river drag me down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time?  Nature’s good-humour was only skin-deep after all.

There was still a long way to go by the winding course of the stream, and darkness had fallen, and a late bell was ringing in Origny Sainte-Benoite, when we arrived.

ORIGNY SAINTE-BENOITE

A BY-DAY

The next day was Sunday, and the church bells had little rest; indeed, I do not think I remember anywhere else so great a choice of services as were here offered to the devout.  And while the bells made merry in the sunshine, all the world with his dog was out shooting among the beets and colza.

In the morning a hawker and his wife went down the street at a foot-pace, singing to a very slow, lamentable music ’O France, mes amours.’  It brought everybody to the door; and when our landlady called in the man to buy the words, he had not a copy of them left.  She was not the first nor the second who had been taken with the song.  There is something very pathetic in the love of the French people, since the war, for dismal patriotic music-making.  I