k up my history-books,
if you were very anxious, and tell you a date or two; for it figured
rather largely in the English wars. But I prefer to mention a girls'
boarding-school, which had an interest for us because it was a girls'
boarding-school, and because we imagined we had rather an interest for
it. At least--there were the girls about the garden; and here were we on
the river; and there was more than one handkerchief waved as we went by.
It caused quite a stir in my heart; and yet how we should have wearied
and despised each other, these girls and I, if we had been introduced at
a croquet party! But this is a fashion I love: to kiss the hand or wave
a handkerchief to people I shall never see again, to play with
possibility, and knock in a peg for fancy to hang upon. It gives the
traveller a jog, reminds him that he is not a traveller everywhere, and
that his journey is no more than a siesta by the way on the real march
of life.

The church at Creil was a nondescript place in the inside, splashed with
gaudy lights from the windows, and picked out with medallions of the
Dolorous Way. But there was one oddity, in the way of an _ex voto_,
which pleased me hugely: a faithful model of a canal boat, swung from
the vault, with a written aspiration that God should conduct the _Saint
Nicolas_ of Creil to a good haven. The thing was neatly executed, and
would have made the delight of a party of boys on the waterside. But
what tickled me was the gravity of the peril to be conjured. You might
hang up the model of a sea-going ship, and welcome: one that is to
plough a furrow round the world, and visit the tropic or the frosty
poles, runs dangers that are well worth a candle and a mass. But the
_Saint Nicolas_ of Creil, which was to be tugged for some ten years by
patient draught-horses, in a weedy canal, with the poplars chattering
overhead, and the skipper whistling at the tiller; which was to do all
its errands in green inland places, and never get out of sight of a
village belfry in all its cruising; why, you would have thought if
anything could be done without the intervention of Providence, it would
be that! But perhaps the skipper was a humorist: or perhaps a prophet,
reminding people of the seriousness of life by this preposterous token.

At Creil, as at Noyon, Saint Joseph seemed a favourite saint on the
score of punctuality. Day and hour can be specified; and grateful people
do not fail to specify them on a votive tab