to me than the canoe, or the river, or the river banks.  Nor this alone:  something inside my mind, a part of my brain, a province of my proper being, had thrown off allegiance and set up for itself, or perhaps for the somebody else who did the paddling.  I had dwindled into quite a little thing in a corner of myself.  I was isolated in my own skull.  Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my thoughts, they were plainly some one else’s; and I considered them like a part of the landscape.  I take it, in short, that I was about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I make the Buddhists my sincere compliments; ’tis an agreeable state, not very consistent with mental brilliancy, not exactly profitable in a money point of view, but very calm, golden, and incurious, and one that sets a man superior to alarms.  It may be best figured by supposing yourself to get dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it.  I have a notion that open-air labourers must spend a large portion of their days in this ecstatic stupor, which explains their high composure and endurance.  A pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here is a better paradise for nothing!

This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in all.  It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished.  Indeed, it lies so far from beaten paths of language, that I despair of getting the reader into sympathy with the smiling, complacent idiocy of my condition; when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees and church spires along the bank surged up, from time to time into my notice, like solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when the rhythmical swish of boat and paddle in the water became a cradle-song to lull my thoughts asleep; when a piece of mud on the deck was sometimes an intolerable eyesore, and sometimes quite a companion for me, and the object of pleased consideration;—­and all the time, with the river running and the shores changing upon either hand, I kept counting my strokes and forgetting the hundreds, the happiest animal in France.

DOWN THE OISE:  CHURCH INTERIORS

We made our first stage below Compiegne to Pont Sainte Maxence.  I was abroad a little after six the next morning.  The air was biting, and smelt of frost.  In an open place a score of women wrangled together over the day’s market; and the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and querulous like that of sparrows on a winter’s morning.  The rare passengers blew into their hands, and shuffled in their wooden shoes to set the blood agog.  The streets were full of icy shadow, although the chimneys were smoking overhead in golden sunshine.  If you wake early enough at this season of the year, you may get up in December to break your fast in June.