buy a
mackintosh at Noyon. It is nothing to get wet; but the misery of these
individual pricks of cold all over my body at the same instant of time
made me flail the water with my paddle like a madman. The _Cigarette_
was greatly amused by these ebullitions. It gave him something else to
look at besides clay banks and willows.

All the time, the river stole away like a thief in straight places, or
swung round corners with an eddy; the willows nodded, and were
undermined all day long; the clay banks tumbled in; the Oise, which had
been so many centuries making the Golden Valley, seemed to have changed
its fancy, and to be bent upon undoing its performance. What a number of
things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its
heart!

NOYON CATHEDRAL

Noyon stands about a mile from the river, in a little plain surrounded
by wooded hills, and entirely covers an eminence with its tile roofs,
surmounted by a long, straight-backed cathedral with two stiff towers.
As we got into the town, the tile roofs seemed to tumble uphill one upon
another, in the oddest disorder; but for all their scrambling, they did
not attain above the knees of the cathedral, which stood, upright and
solemn, over all. As the streets drew near to this presiding genius,
through the market-place under the Hotel de Ville, they grew emptier and
more composed. Blank walls and shuttered windows were turned to the
great edifice, and grass grew on the white causeway. "Put off thy shoes
from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."
The Hotel du Nord, nevertheless, lights its secular tapers within a
stone-cast of the church; and we had the superb east-end before our eyes
all morning from the window of our bedroom. I have seldom looked on the
east-end of a church with more complete sympathy. As it flanges out in
three wide terraces and settles down broadly on the earth, it looks like
the poop of some great old battle-ship. Hollow-backed buttresses carry
vases, which figure for the stern lanterns. There is a roll in the
ground, and the towers just appear above the pitch of the roof, as
though the good ship were bowing lazily over an Atlantic swell. At any
moment it might be a hundred feet away from you, climbing the next
billow. At any moment a window might open, and some old admiral thrust
forth a cocked hat, and proceed to take an observation. The old
admirals sail the sea no longer; the old ships of battle