r all, could have
done a graceful thing more gracefully. "Come back again!" she cried; and
all the others echoed her; and the hills about Origny repeated the
words, "Come back." But the river had us round an angle in a twinkling,
and we were alone with the green trees and running water.

Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the impetuous
stream of life.

"The merchant bows unto the seaman's star,
The ploughman from the sun his season takes."

And we must all set our pocket-watches by the clock of fate. There is a
headlong, forthright tide, that bears away man with his fancies like a
straw, and runs fast in time and space. It is full of curves like this,
your winding river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant
pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at all. For
though it should revisit the same acre of meadow in the same hour, it
will have made an ample sweep between-whiles; many little streams will
have fallen in; many exhalations risen towards the sun; and even
although it were the same acre, it will no more be the same river of
Oise. And thus, O graces of Origny, although the wandering fortune of my
life should carry me back again to where you await death's whistle by
the river, that will not be the old I who walks the street; and those
wives and mothers, say, will those be you?

There was never any mistake about the Oise, as a matter of fact. In
these upper reaches it was still in a prodigious hurry for the sea. It
ran so fast and merrily, through all the windings of its channel, that I
strained my thumb, fighting with the rapids, and had to paddle all the
rest of the way with one hand turned up. Sometimes it had to serve
mills; and being still a little river, ran very dry and shallow in the
meanwhile. We had to put our legs out of the boat, and shove ourselves
off the sand of the bottom with our feet. And still it went on its way
singing among the poplars, and making a green valley in the world. After
a good woman, and a good book, and tobacco, there is nothing so
agreeable on earth as a river. I forgave it its attempt on my life;
which was after all one part owing to the unruly winds of heaven that
had blown down the tree, one part to my own mismanagement, and only a
third part to the river itself, and that not out of malice, but from its
great preoccupation over its business of getting to the sea. A difficult
business, too; for the detours it had to make are n