told that it would go down stream like an arrow, and so it did. There was
no need to row hard, for the current took the fragile skiff along with it
so fast that the trees on the banks sped by as if they were running
races, and every few minutes brought a change of landscape. It was very
delightful; only one sensation of movement could have been better--that of
flying.

The water was as blue as the sky above, and over the valley, the wooded
hills, and naked rocks lay the sunshine of early autumn, tender in its
strength, mingling a balm with its burning. I seemed to be floating swiftly
but gently down some lovely but treacherous river of enchanted land. And
where is the river that lends itself better to this illusion than
the Dordogne--ever charming, changing, and luring like a capricious,
fascinating, and rather wicked woman? Now it flows without a sound by
the forest, where the imagination places the fairy people and the sylvan
deities; now it roars in the shadow of the castle-crowned and savage rock,
over which the solitary hawk circles and repeats its melancholy cry; now it
seems to sleep like a blue lake in the midst of a broad, fair valley, where
in the sunny fields the flocks feed drowsily.

The depth of the water was as variable as the strength of the current.
Sometimes I saw the stony bed seven or ten feet below, and then quite
suddenly the boat would get into rushing water that sparkled with crystal
clearness over a bank of pebbles, and I expected momentarily to hear a
grating noise and to feel myself aground; but the little boat went over the
shallows like a leaf. I passed a bank large enough to be called an island.
The water had not covered it for months, and it was all thickly overgrown
with persicaria, which the late summer had stained a carmine red, so that
the island was all aflame. The swallows that dipped their wings in the
water, the kingfishers that flew along the banks or perched on the willow