orm, not even at noon upon a Sunday.

There was no one to see us off but the early washerwomen--early and
late--who were already beating the linen in their floating lavatory on
the river. They were very merry and matutinal in their ways; plunged
their arms boldly in, and seemed not to feel the shock. It would be
dispiriting to me, this early beginning and first cold dabble of a most
dispiriting day's work. But I believe they would have been as unwilling
to change days with us as we could be to change with them. They crowded
to the door to watch us paddle away into the thin sunny mists upon the
river; and shouted heartily alter us till we were through the bridge.

CHANGED TIMES

There is a sense in which those mists never rose from off our journey;
and from that time forth they lie very densely in my note-book. As long
as the Oise was a small rural river, it took us near by people's doors,
and we could hold a conversation with natives in the riparian fields.
But now that it had grown so wide, the life along shore passed us by at
a distance. It was the same difference as between a great public highway
and a country by-path that wanders in and out of cottage gardens. We now
lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated
into civilized life, where people pass without salutation. In sparsely
inhabited places, we make all we can of each encounter; but when it
comes to a city, we keep to ourselves, and never speak unless we have
trodden on a man's toes. In these waters we were no longer strange
birds, and nobody supposed we had travelled farther than from the last
town. I remember, when we came into L'Isle Adam, for instance, how we
met dozens of pleasure-boats outing it for the afternoon, and there was
nothing to distinguish the true voyager from the amateur, except,
perhaps, the filthy condition of my sail. The company in one boat
actually thought they recognized me for a neighbour. Was there ever
anything more wounding? All the romance had come down to that. Now, on
the upper Oise, where nothing sailed as a general thing but fish, a pair
of canoeists could not be thus vulgarly explained away; we were strange
and picturesque intruders; and out of people's wonder sprang a sort of
light and passing intimacy all along our route. There is nothing but
tit-for-tat in this world, though sometimes it be a little difficult to
trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves, and there has never
yet b