At last the guns and the thunder dropped off; the sun shone on the wet meadows; the air was scented with the breath of rejoicing trees and grass; and the river kept unweariedly carrying us on at its best pace.  There was a manufacturing district about Chauny; and after that the banks grew so high that they hid the adjacent country, and we could see nothing but clay sides, and one willow after another.  Only, here and there, we passed by a village or a ferry, and some wondering child upon the bank would stare after us until we turned the corner.  I daresay we continued to paddle in that child’s dreams for many a night after.

Sun and shower alternated like day and night, making the hours longer by their variety.  When the showers were heavy, I could feel each drop striking through my jersey to my warm skin; and the accumulation of small shocks put me nearly beside myself.  I decided I should buy a mackintosh at Noyon.  It is nothing to get wet; but the misery of these individual pricks of cold all over my body at the same instant of time made me flail the water with my paddle like a madman.  The Cigarette was greatly amused by these ebullitions.  It gave him something else to look at besides clay banks and willows.

All the time, the river stole away like a thief in straight places, or swung round corners with an eddy; the willows nodded, and were undermined all day long; the clay banks tumbled in; the Oise, which had been so many centuries making the Golden Valley, seemed to have changed its fancy, and be bent upon undoing its performance.  What a number of things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its heart!

NOYON CATHEDRAL

Noyon stands about a mile from the river, in a little plain surrounded by wooded hills, and entirely covers an eminence with its tile roofs, surmounted by a long, straight-backed cathedral with two stiff towers.  As we got into the town, the tile roofs seemed to tumble uphill one upon another, in the oddest disorder; but for all their scrambling, they did not attain above the knees of the cathedral, which stood, upright and solemn, over all.  As the streets drew near to this presiding genius, through the market-place under the Hotel de Ville, they grew emptier and more composed.  Blank walls and shuttered windows were turned to the great edifice, and grass grew on the white causeway.  ’Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.’  The Hotel du Nord, nevertheless, lights its secular tapers within a stone-cast of the church; and we had the superb east-end before our eyes all morning from the window of our bedroom.  I have seldom looked on the east-end of a church with more complete sympathy.  As it flanges out in three wide terraces and settles down broadly on the earth, it looks like the poop of some great old battle-ship.  Hollow-backed buttresses