In a little while the canal, coming to its last lock, began to discharge its water-houses on the Oise; so that we had no lack of company to fear.  Here were all our old friends; the Deo Gratias of Conde and the Four Sons of Aymon journeyed cheerily down stream along with us; we exchanged waterside pleasantries with the steersman perched among the lumber, or the driver hoarse with bawling to his horses; and the children came and looked over the side as we paddled by.  We had never known all this while how much we missed them; but it gave us a fillip to see the smoke from their chimneys.

A little below this junction we made another meeting of yet more account.  For there we were joined by the Aisne, already a far-travelled river and fresh out of Champagne.  Here ended the adolescence of the Oise; this was his marriage day; thenceforward he had a stately, brimming march, conscious of his own dignity and sundry dams.  He became a tranquil feature in the scene.  The trees and towns saw themselves in him, as in a mirror.  He carried the canoes lightly on his broad breast; there was no need to work hard against an eddy:  but idleness became the order of the day, and mere straightforward dipping of the paddle, now on this side, now on that, without intelligence or effort.  Truly we were coming into halcyon weather upon all accounts, and were floated towards the sea like gentlemen.

We made Compiegne as the sun was going down:  a fine profile of a town above the river.  Over the bridge, a regiment was parading to the drum.  People loitered on the quay, some fishing, some looking idly at the stream.  And as the two boats shot in along the water, we could see them pointing them out and speaking one to another.  We landed at a floating lavatory, where the washerwomen were still beating the clothes.

AT COMPIEGNE

We put up at a big, bustling hotel in Compiegne, where nobody observed our presence.

Reservery and general militarismus (as the Germans call it) were rampant.  A camp of conical white tents without the town looked like a leaf out of a picture Bible; sword-belts decorated the walls of the cafes; and the streets kept sounding all day long with military music.  It was not possible to be an Englishman and avoid a feeling of elation; for the men who followed the drums were small, and walked shabbily.  Each man inclined at his own angle, and jolted to his own convenience, as he went.  There was nothing of the superb gait with which a regiment of tall Highlanders moves behind its music, solemn and inevitable, like a natural phenomenon.  Who that has seen it can forget the drum-major pacing in front, the drummers’ tiger-skins, the pipers’ swinging plaids, the strange elastic rhythm of the whole regiment footing it in time—­and the bang of the drum, when the brasses cease, and the shrill pipes take up the martial story in their place?