uainted with French. For indeed I have had such
experience at home, that I would sooner meet many wild animals than a
troop of healthy urchins.

But I was doing injustice to these peaceable young Hainaulters. When the
_Cigarette_ went off to make inquiries, I got out upon the bank to smoke
a pipe and superintend the boats, and became at once the centre of much
amiable curiosity. The children had been joined by this time by a young
woman and a mild lad who had lost an arm; and this gave me more
security. When I let slip my first word or so in French, a little girl
nodded her head with a comical grown-up air. "Ah, you see," she said,
"he understands well enough now; he was just making believe." And the
little group laughed together very good-naturedly.

They were much impressed when they heard we came from England; and the
little girl proffered the information that England was an island "and a
far way from here--_bien loin d'ici_."

"Ay, you may say that,--a far way from here," said the lad with one arm.

I was as nearly home-sick as ever I was in my life; they seemed to make
it such an incalculable distance to the place where I first saw the day.

They admired the canoes very much. And I observed one piece of delicacy
in these children, which is worthy of record. They had been deafening us
for the last hundred yards with petitions for a sail; ay, and they
deafened us to the same tune next morning when we came to start; but
then, when the canoes were lying empty, there was no word of any such
petition. Delicacy? or perhaps a bit of fear for the water in so crank a
vessel? I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless
perhaps the two were the same thing! And yet 'tis a good tonic; the cold
tub and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life
in cases of advanced sensibility.

From the boats they turned to my costume. They could not make enough of
my red sash; and my knife filled them with awe.

"They make them like that in England," said the boy with one arm. I was
glad he did not know how badly we make them in England nowadays. "They
are for people who go away to sea," he added, "and to defend one's life
against great fish."

I felt I was becoming a more and more romantic figure to the little
group at every word. And so I suppose I was. Even my pipe, although it
was an ordinary French clay, pretty well "trousered," as they call it,
would have a rarity in their eyes, as a thing co