At Creil, where we stopped to lunch, we left the canoes in another floating lavatory, which, as it was high noon, was packed with washerwomen, red-handed and loud-voiced; and they and their broad jokes are about all I remember of the place.  I could look up my history-books, if you were very anxious, and tell you a date or two; for it figured rather largely in the English wars.  But I prefer to mention a girls’ boarding-school, which had an interest for us because it was a girls’ boarding-school, and because we imagined we had rather an interest for it.  At least—­there were the girls about the garden; and here were we on the river; and there was more than one handkerchief waved as we went by.  It caused quite a stir in my heart; and yet how we should have wearied and despised each other, these girls and I, if we had been introduced at a croquet-party!  But this is a fashion I love:  to kiss the hand or wave a handkerchief to people I shall never see again, to play with possibility, and knock in a peg for fancy to hang upon.  It gives the traveller a jog, reminds him that he is not a traveller everywhere, and that his journey is no more than a siesta by the way on the real march of life.

The church at Creil was a nondescript place in the inside, splashed with gaudy lights from the windows, and picked out with medallions of the Dolorous Way.  But there was one oddity, in the way of an ex voto, which pleased me hugely:  a faithful model of a canal boat, swung from the vault, with a written aspiration that God should conduct the Saint Nicolas of Creil to a good haven.  The thing was neatly executed, and would have made the delight of a party of boys on the waterside.  But what tickled me was the gravity of the peril to be conjured.  You might hang up the model of a sea-going ship, and welcome:  one that is to plough a furrow round the world, and visit the tropic or the frosty poles, runs dangers that are well worth a candle and a mass.  But the Saint Nicolas of Creil, which was to be tugged for some ten years by patient draught-horses, in a weedy canal, with the poplars chattering overhead, and the skipper whistling at the tiller; which was to do all its errands in green inland places, and never get out of sight of a village belfry in all its cruising; why, you would have thought if anything could be done without the intervention of Providence, it would be that!  But perhaps the skipper was a humorist:  or perhaps a prophet, reminding people of the seriousness of life by this preposterous token.

At Creil, as at Noyon, Saint Joseph seemed a favourite saint on the score of punctuality.  Day and hour can be specified; and grateful people do not fail to specify them on a votive tablet, when prayers have been punctually and neatly answered.  Whenever time is a consideration, Saint Joseph is the proper intermediary.  I took a sort of pleasure in observing the vogue he had in France, for the good man plays a very small part in my religion at home.  Yet I could not help fearing that, where the Saint is so much commanded for exactitude, he will be expected to be very grateful for his tablet.