did, and
hunted up lodgings in the town for the night, vowing to get an extra
early start in the morning to make up for lost time.

The Seine at Meulan takes on a certain luxuryous aspect so far as
river-boating goes. There is even a "Cercle a la Voile," with yachts
which, in the narrow confines of the river, look like the real thing,
but which after all are very diminutive members of the family.

From this point the course of the Seine is a complicated winding
among _iles_ and _ilots_, which gives it that elongation which makes
necessary hours of journeying by boat as against a quarter of the
time by the road--as the crow flies--to the lower fortifications of
Paris.

On either side, however, are _chemins vicinales_, which continually
produce unthought-of vistas which automobilists who are making a
record from Trouville to Paris know nothing of.

Triel possesses an imposing thirteenth-century Gothic church and an
abominably ugly suspension-bridge of wire rope. It is a good place to
buy a boat or a cargo of gypsum, which we know as "plaster of Paris;"
otherwise the town is not remarkable, though charmingly situated.

The Oise is the first really great commercial tributary of the Seine.
There is a mighty flow of commerce which ascends and descends the
bosom of the Oise, extending even to the Low Countries and the German
Ocean, through the Sambre to Antwerp and the Scheldt.

The Oise is classed as _flottable_ from Beautor to Chauny, a distance
of twenty kilometres, and _navigable_ from Chauny to the Seine.
Mostly it runs through the great plain of Picardie and forms the
natural northern boundary to the ancient Ile de France. The
_navigable_ portion forms two sections. One, of fifty-five
kilometres, extends between Chauny and Janville, and has been
generally abandoned by water-craft because of the opening of the
Canal Lateral a la Oise; the other section, of one hundred and four
kilometres, is canalized in that it has been straightened here and
there at sharp corners, dredged and endowed with seven locks.

The barge traffic of the Oise is mostly towed in convoys of six, but
there is a _chemin de halage_, a tow-path, throughout the river's
length. In general, the boats are of moderate size, the _peniches_
being perhaps a hundred and twenty feet in length, the _bateaux
picards_ somewhat longer, and the _chalands_ approximating one
hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy-five feet.

While, as stated above, the t