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
