blue-green sky is cut by a broken line of hill and tree, the rocks become
animated in the clear-obscure, and the apparently dead matter, rousing from
its apathy, takes awful forms and expressions of life.

My small boat had been lying on the Vezere several days doing nothing, when
I decided upon a little water-faring up the stream. This canoe had been
knocked together with a few deal boards. It had, as a matter of course,
a flat bottom, for a boat with a keel would be quite unsuitable for
travelling long distances on rivers where, if you cannot float in four
inches of water, you must hold yourself in constant readiness to get out
and drag or push your craft over the stones. This exercise is very amusing
at the age of twenty, but the fun grows feeble as time goes on. My boat
was not made to be rowed, but to be paddled, either with the short
single-bladed paddle which is used by the fishermen of the Dordogne, and
which they call a 'shovel,' or by the one that is dipped on both sides of
the canoe alternately. There being rapids about every half-mile on the
Vezere, and the current in places being very strong, I realized that no
paddler would be able to get up the stream without help, and so I induced
my landlord to accompany me and to bring a pole. He was a good-tempered
man, somewhat adventurous, with plenty of information, and a full-flavoured
local accent which often gave to what he said a point of humour that was
not intended. The voyage, therefore, commenced under circumstances that
promised nothing but pleasantness. It was a perfectly beautiful May
afternoon, with a fresh north breeze blowing that tempered the ardour of
the sun.

The water changed like the moods of a child who has only to choose the form
and manner of his pleasure. Now it pictured in its large eye, whose depth
seemed to meet eternity, the lights and forms and colours of the sky, the
rocks, and the trees; now it leapt from the shaded quietude, and, splitting