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there is no moon, the river seems limitless. A sailor has not the same
feeling for the sea. It is often remorseless and cruel, it is true; but
it shrieks, it roars, it is honest, the great sea; while the river
is silent and perfidious. It does not speak, it flows along without a
sound; and this eternal motion of flowing water is more terrible to me
than the high waves of the ocean.

Dreamers maintain that the sea hides in its bosom vast tracts of blue
where those who are drowned roam among the big fishes, amid strange
forests and crystal grottoes. The river has only black depths where one
rots in the slime. It is beautiful, however, when it sparkles in
the light of the rising sun and gently laps its banks covered with
whispering reeds.

The poet says, speaking of the ocean,

"O waves, what mournful tragedies ye know
--Deep waves, the dread of kneeling mothers' hearts!
Ye tell them to each other as ye roll
On flowing tide, and this it is that gives
The sad despairing tones unto your voice
As on ye roll at eve by mounting tide."

Well, I think that the stories whispered by the slender reeds, with
their little soft voices, must be more sinister than the lugubrious
tragedies told by the roaring of the waves.

But as you have asked for some of my recollections, I will tell you of a
singular adventure that happened to me ten years ago.

I was living, as I am now, in Mother Lafon's house, and one of my
closest friends, Louis Bernet who has now given up boating, his low
shoes and his bare neck, to go into the Supreme Court, was living in
the village of C., two leagues further down the river. We dined together
every day, sometimes at his house, sometimes at mine.

One evening as I was coming home along and was pretty tired, rowing
with difficulty my big boat, a twelve-footer, which I always took out
at night, I stopped a few moments to draw breath near the reed-covered
point yonder, about two hundred metres from the railway bridge.

It was a magnificent night, the moon shone brightly, the river gleamed,
the air was calm and soft. This peacefulness tempted me. I thought to
myself that it would be pleasant to smoke a pipe in this spot. I took up
my anchor and cast it into the river.

The boat floated downstream with the current, to the end of the chain,
and then stopped, and I seated myself in the stern on my sheepskin and
made myself as comfortable as possible. There was not a sound to be
heard, ex