We made Compiègne 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.
We put up at a big, bustling hotel in Compiègne, where nobody observed our presence.... It is not possible to rise before a village; but Compiègne was so grown a town that it took its ease in the morning; and we were up and away while it was still in dressing-gown and slippers. The streets were left to people washing door-steps; nobody was in full dress but the cavaliers upon the town-hall; they were all washed with dew, spruce in their gilding and full of intelligence and a sense of professional responsibility. Kling, went they on the bells for the half-past six, as we went by. I took it kind of them to make me this parting compliment; they never were in better form, not even at noon upon a Sunday.
There was no one to see us off but the early washerwomen--early and late--who were already beating the linen in their floating lavatory on the river. They were very merry and matutinal in their ways; plunged their arms boldly in and seemed not to feel the shock. It would be dispiriting to me, this early beginning and first cold dabble, of a most dispiriting day’s work. But I believe they would have been as unwilling to change days with us, as we could be to change with them. They crowded to the door to watch us paddle away into the thin sunny mists upon the river; and shouted heartily after us till we were through the bridge.
There is a sense in which those mists never rose from off our journey; and from that time forth they lie very densely in my note-book. As long as the Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people’s doors and we could hold a conversation with natives in the riparian fields. But now that it had gone so wide, the life along shore passed us by at a distance. It was the same difference as between a great public highway and a country by-path that wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated into civilized life, where people pass without salutation. In sparsely inhabited places, we make all we can of each encounter; but when it comes to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless we have trodden on a man’s toes. In these waters, we were no longer strange birds, and nobody supposed we had travelled further than from the last town. I remember when we came into L’ Isle Adam, for instance, how we met dozens of pleasure-boats, outing it for the afternoon, and there was nothing to distinguish the true voyager from the amateur, except, perhaps, the filthy condition of my sail. The company in one boat actually thought they recognized me for a neighbour. Was there ever anything more wounding! All the romance had come down to that. Now, on the upper Oise, where nothing sailed as a general thing but fish, a pair of canoeists could not be thus vulgarly explained away; we were strange and picturesque intruders; and out of people’s wonder sprang a sort of light and passing intimacy all along our route....
In our earlier adventures there was generally something to do, and that quickened us. Even the showers of rain had a revivifying effect, and shook up the brain from torpor. But now, when the river no longer ran in a proper sense, only glided seaward with an even, outright, but imperceptible speed, and when the sky smiled upon us day after day without variety, we began to slip into that golden doze of the wind which follows upon much exercise in the open air. I have stupefied myself in this way more than once; indeed, I dearly love the feeling; but I never had it to the same degree as when paddling down the Oise. It was the apotheosis of stupidity....
We made our first stage below Compiègne 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.
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.... 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 Nicholas_ of Creil to a good haven.
We made Précy about sundown. The plain is rich with tufts of poplar. In a wide, luminous curve, the Oise lay under the hillside. A faint mist began to rise and confound the different distances together. There was not a sound audible but that of the sheep-bells in some meadows by the river and the creaking of a cart down the long road that descends the hill. The villas in their gardens, the shops along the street, all seemed to have been deserted the day before; and I felt inclined to walk discreetly as one feels in a silent forest.
Of the next two days’ sail little remains in my mind, and nothing whatever in my note-book. The river streamed on steadily through pleasant riverside landscapes. Washerwomen in blue dresses, fishers in blue blouses, diversified the green banks; and the relation of the two colours was like that of the flower and leaf in the forget-me-not. A symphony in forget-me-not; I think Théophile Gautier might thus have characterized that two days’ panorama. The sky was blue and cloudless; and the sliding surface of the river held up, in smooth places, a mirror to the heaven and the shores. The washerwomen hailed us laughingly and the noise of trees and water made an accompaniment to our dozing thoughts, as we fleeted down the stream.
The great volume, the indefatigable purpose of the river held the mind in chain. It seemed now so sure of its end, so strong and easy in its gait, like a grown man full of determination. The surf was roaring for it on the sands of Havre.
THE HUDSON
ESTHER SINGLETON
The Hudson is considered the most beautiful river of the United States. Its scenery is so enchanting that it has been called the “Rhine of America.” Its hills and banks are dotted with palatial residences. To the historian they are eloquent of the brave generals and their armies who fought for Liberty and they charm the dreamer by the legends that cluster around them. It is no trouble for him to see the Phantom Ship scudding across the Tappan Zee, or to people Sleepy Hollow with vanished forms.
George William Curtis pronounced the Rhine of America even grander than the Rhine. He says: “The Danube has in part glimpses of such grandeur. The Elbe has sometimes such delicately pencilled effects. But no European river is so lordly in its bearing, none flows in such state to the sea.”
The Hudson’s course of three hundred miles told briefly is as follows:
It rises in the Adirondacks about 4,000 feet above the sea, where innumerable little streams fed by mountain lakes unite to form the headwaters of the noble river that begins a tortuous course and receives the outlet of Schroon Lake and the Sacondaga River. Turning to the east, it finally reaches Glen’s Falls, where it drops fifty feet. From thence to Troy, it is much broken by rapids, and it is not until it reaches Albany, six miles below Troy, that the Hudson becomes wide and flows through elevated and picturesque banks. Then, in its journey, it passes by the Catskills, or as the Indians called them--the Ontioras (Mountains of the Sky) which are but seven miles from its banks. A short distance below Newburg, sixty-one miles from New York, it begins its passage through the noble hills called The Highlands, an area of about sixteen by twenty-five miles. In the midst of this beautiful scenery on a bold promontory stands the United States Military Academy at West Point. The river then widens into Haverstraw Bay, immediately below which is Tappan Zee, extending from Teller’s Point to Piermont, twelve miles long and from three to four miles wide. Just below Piermont, a range of trap rock--the Palisades--extends to Fort Lee, a distance of about fifteen miles. From Fort Lee to its mouth the Hudson is from one mile to two miles long. The Hudson has been called Shatemuck, the Mohegan, the Manhattan, the Mauritius (in honour of Prince Maurice of Nassau) the Noordt Montaigne, the North River (to distinguish it from the Delaware or South River) the River of the Mountains, and, finally, the Hudson in honour of its discoverer.