altar
to altar, circumnavigating the church. To each shrine she dedicated an
equal number of beads and an equal length of time. Like a prudent
capitalist with a somewhat cynical view of the commercial prospect, she
desired to place her supplications in a great variety of heavenly
securities. She would risk nothing on the credit of any single
intercessor. Out of the whole company of saints and angels, not one but
was to suppose himself her champion-elect against the Great Assize! I
could only think of it as a dull, transparent jugglery, based upon
unconscious unbelief.

She was as dead an old woman as ever I saw; no more than bone and
parchment, curiously put together. Her eyes, with which she interrogated
mine, were vacant of sense. It depends on what you call seeing, whether
you might not call her blind. Perhaps she had known love: perhaps borne
children, suckled them and given them pet names. But now that was all
gone by, and had left her neither happier nor wiser; and the best she
could do with her mornings was to come up here into the cold church and
juggle for a slice of heaven. It was not without a gulp that I escaped
into the streets and the keen morning air. Morning? why, how tired of it
she would be before night! and if she did not sleep, how then? It is
fortunate that not many of us are brought up publicly to justify our
lives at the bar of threescore years and ten; fortunate that such a
number are knocked opportunely on the head in what they call the flower
of their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in private
somewhere else. Otherwise, between sick children and discontented old
folk, we might be put out of all conceit of life.

I had need of all my cerebral hygiene during that day's paddle: the old
devotee stuck in my throat sorely. But I was soon in the seventh heaven
of stupidity; and knew nothing but that somebody was paddling a canoe,
while I was counting his strokes, and forgetting the hundreds. I used
sometimes to be afraid I should remember the hundreds; which would have
made a toil of a pleasure; but the terror was chimerical, they went out
of my mind by enchantment, and I knew no more than the man in the moon
about my only occupation.

At Creil, where we stopped to lunch, we left the canoes in another
floating lavatory, which, as it was high noon, was packed with
washerwomen, red-handed and loud-voiced; and they and their broad jokes
are about all I remember of the place. I could loo