to the Club's prosperity, one of their number escorted us to an

hotel. He would not join us at our dinner, but he had no objection
to a glass of wine. Enthusiasm is very wearing; and I begin to

understand why prophets were unpopular in Judaea, where they were
best known. For three stricken hours did this excellent young man

sit beside us to dilate on boats and boat-races; and before he
left, he was kind enough to order our bedroom candles.

We endeavoured now and again to change the subject; but the
diversion did not last a moment: the Royal Nautical Sportsman

bridled, shied, answered the question, and then breasted once more
into the swelling tide of his subject. I call it his subject; but

I think it was he who was subjected. The ARETHUSA, who holds all
racing as a creature of the devil, found himself in a pitiful

dilemma. He durst not own his ignorance for the honour of Old
England, and spoke away about English clubs and English oarsmen

whose fame had never before come to his ears. Several times, and,
once above all, on the question of sliding-seats, he was within an

ace of exposure. As for the CIGARETTE, who has rowed races in the
heat of his blood, but now disowns these slips of his wanton youth,

his case was still more desperate; for the Royal Nautical proposed
that he should take an oar in one of their eights on the morrow, to

compare the English with the Belgian stroke. I could see my friend
perspiring in his chair whenever that particular topic came up.

And there was yet another proposal which had the same effect on
both of us. It appeared that the champion canoeist of Europe (as

well as most other champions) was a Royal Nautical Sportsman. And
if we would only wait until the Sunday, this infernal paddler would

be so condescending as to accompany us on our next stage. Neither
of us had the least desire to drive the coursers of the sun against

Apollo.
When the young man was gone, we countermanded our candles, and

ordered some brandy and water. The great billows had gone over our
head. The Royal Nautical Sportsmen were as nice young fellows as a

man would wish to see, but they were a trifle too young and a
thought too nautical for us. We began to see that we were old and

cynical; we liked ease and the agreeable rambling of the human mind
about this and the other subject; we did not want to disgrace our

native land by messing an eight, or toiling pitifully in the wake
of the champion canoeist. In short, we had recourse to flight. It

seemed ungrateful, but we tried to make that good on a card loaded
with sincere compliments. And indeed it was no time for scruples;

we seemed to feel the hot breath of the champion on our necks.
AT MAUBEUGE

PARTLY from the terror we had of our good friends the Royal
Nauticals, partly from the fact that there were no fewer than

fifty-five locks between Brussels and Charleroi, we concluded that
we should travel by train across the frontier, boats and all.

Fifty-five locks in a day's journey was pretty well tantamount to
trudging the whole distance on foot, with the canoes upon our

shoulders, an object of astonishment to the trees on the canal
side, and of honest derision to all right-thinking children.

To pass the frontier, even in a train, is a difficult matter for
the ARETHUSA. He is somehow or other a marked man for the official

eye. Wherever he journeys, there are the officers gathered
together. Treaties are solemnly signed, foreign ministers,

ambassadors, and consuls sit throned in state from China to Peru,
and the Union Jack flutters on all the winds of heaven. Under

these safeguards, portly clergymen, school-mistresses, gentlemen in
grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and rabble of British touristry

pour unhindered, MURRAY in hand, over the railways of the
Continent, and yet the slim person of the ARETHUSA is taken in the

meshes, while these great fish go on their way rejoicing. If he
travels without a passport, he is cast, without any figure about

the matter, into noisome dungeons: if his papers are in order, he
is suffered to go his way indeed, but not until he has been

humiliated by a general incredulity. He is a born British subject,
yet he has never succeeded in persuading a single official of his

nationality. He flatters himself he is indifferent honest; yet he
is rarely taken for anything better than a spy, and there is no

absurd and disreputable means of livelihood but has been attributed
to him in some heat of official or popular distrust. . . .

For the life of me I cannot understand it. I too have been knolled
to church, and sat at good men's feasts; but I bear no mark of it.

I am as strange as a Jack Indian to their official spectacles. I
might come from any part of the globe, it seems, except from where

I do. My ancestors have laboured in vain, and the glorious
Constitution cannot protect me in my walks abroad. It is a great

thing, believe me, to present a good normal type of the nation you
belong to.

Nobody else was asked for his papers on the way to Maubeuge; but I
was; and although I clung to my rights, I had to choose at last

between accepting the humiliation and being left behind by the
train. I was sorry to give way; but I wanted to get to Maubeuge.

Maubeuge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the GRAND CERF.
It seemed to be inhabited principally by soldiers and bagmen; at

least, these were all that we saw, except the hotel servants. We
had to stay there some time, for the canoes were in no hurry to

follow us, and at last stuck hopelessly in the custom-house until
we went back to liberate them. There was nothing to do, nothing to

see. We had good meals, which was a great matter; but that was
all.

The CIGARETTE was nearly taken up upon a charge of drawing the
fortifications: a feat of which he was hopelesslyincapable. And

besides, as I suppose each belligerent nation has a plan of the
other's fortified places already, these precautions are of the

nature of shutting the stable door after the steed is away. But I
have no doubt they help to keep up a good spirit at home. It is a

great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or
other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger. Even the

Freemasons, who have been shown up to satiety, preserve a kind of
pride; and not a grocer among them, however honest, harmless, and

empty-headed he may feel himself to be at bottom, but comes home
from one of their COENACULA with a portentous significance for

himself.
It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can

live in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the
spectacle of a whole life in which you have no part paralyses

personal desire. You are content to become a mere spectator. The
baker stands in his door; the colonel with his three medals goes by

to the CAFE at night; the troops drum and trumpet and man the
ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It would task language to say

how placidly you behold all this. In a place where you have taken
some root, you are provoked out of your indifference; you have a

hand in the game; your friends are fighting with the army. But in
a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor so

large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so far
apart from the business, that you positively forget it would be

possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around
you, that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a

very short time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into
a wood, with all nature seething around them, with romance on every

side; it would be much more to the purpose if they took up their
abode in a dull country town, where they should see just so much of

humanity as to keep them from desiring more, and only the stale
externals of man's life. These externals are as dead to us as so

many formalities, and speak a dead language in our eyes and ears.
They have no more meaning than an oath or a salutation. We are so

much accustomed to see married couples going to church of a Sunday
that we have clean forgotten what they represent; and novelists are

driven to rehabilitate adultery, no less, when they wish to show us
what a beautiful thing it is for a man and a woman to live for each

other.
One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than his

outside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enough