breakfast cooking, and the Rob Roy's lamp too was
speedily in full blast. Eggs or butter or milk were instantly purveyed,
if within reach at a lock; sometimes delicious strawberries and other
fruits or dainties, the only difficulty was to cook at all properly while
steering and being towed.

It is easy to cook and to steer at sea without looking up for many
minutes. The compass tells you by a glance, and if not, the tiller has a
nudge which speaks to the man who knows the meaning of its various
pressures, through any part of his body it may happen to touch. But if
you forget to steer constantly and minutely in a heavy boat towed on a
river, she swerves in an instant, and shoots out right and left, and
dives into banks or trees, or into the steamer's side-swell, and the man
at the wheel turns round with a courteous French scowl, for he feels by
_his_ tiller in a moment, and you cannot escape his rebuke.

There was no romance in this manner of progress up the river. The poetry
of wandering where you will, and all alone, cannot be thrown around a
boat pulled by the nose while you are sitting in her all day. The Rob
Roy, with mast down, and tied by a tow-rope, was like an eagle limping
with clipped pinion and a chained foot. Still, for the man not churlish,
there is scarcely any time or place or person wholly devoid of interest,
if he is determined to find it there.

The steamboat captain and crew were chatty enough; and when we towed a
string of barges, the yawl was lashed alongside of one of these (and not
at the end of the line), so that I visited my fellow-travellers, and soon
became friends, and then interchanged presents. All this "Social
Science" of the sailor was far better done by the French bargee than in
England.

In both countries they frequently mistook me at first for a common sailor
in charge of a yacht, for my dress told no more. As intercourse
proceeded it was curious to watch the gradual recognition of the fact
that this "sailor" talked and thought not just the same as others. Then
they regarded me as an agent come to sell the pretty boat; but it was in
England only that any of them could be made to believe that the owner of
the Rob Roy "would not part with his boat, did not want a cook or
cabin-boy, and was not at all anxious to see the end of his voyage."
Sometimes the conversation, begun as between equals, would gradually get
the word "Sir" sprinkled over it; and once or twice--and this not