Opposite the inn, shored up against the piers of an ancient stone bridge, framed in a clump of towering poplars, stands a cardboard box of a house, its sides painted in imitation of brick. It looks like a toy from which one could lift the gabled roof and find chocolates and marrons in layers within.

Near by this bonbonniÈre, in the shade of the overhanging trees, a gouty old gentleman beneath a green cotton umbrella watches intently a tiny red quill floating midway up his line, altho it has given no signal of alarm for hours.

A gentle breeze shirrs the surface of the water. The old gentleman pours a little vin ordinaire into a glass, rebaits his hook, and lights a fresh cigar. Masses of white clouds overhead float in the clear blue sky.

Just around the point of the island another boat is moored to two long poles. In it a young man sits fishing; his sweetheart, who a night ago had been dining at Maxime’s exquisitely gowned, is now by his side in a calico wrapper and a straw garden-hat, the brim of which is pulled down until all that remains visible of her face is the tip of her retroussÉ nose, her rosebud mouth and her adorable dimpled chin.

Shouts and shrieks of laughter come from other boats tied along this quiet stretch of the river.

Tiny villas, their gardens gay in geraniums, skirt the edge of the stream, where on little wharves sheltered by awnings other Parisians spend the day a fishing. On one of these an old lady in a black silk dress reclines in an armchair, her fishing-rod thrust in a convenient rest, while she occupies herself with her fancy work, talking at intervals to her husband, a dapper little man in a white waistcoat. The family butler has just brought him a fresh pailful of bait, the first supply having been exhausted in the capture of two diminutive goujons, a delicate little fish playing an important part in every friture along the Seine. It is served like whitebait, crisp and garnished with watercress and lemon. Opposite my own boat there is another villa half hidden in the tangle of a pretty garden full of roses.

Here a flat barge is moored to the bank, and in it three people are fishing. In the bow sits a genial clean-shaven old gentleman, a celebrated actor, whose red cravat is reflected in the water by a wiggling scarlet spiral. In the middle of the barge is seated Mademoiselle Yvette, of the Bouffes Parisiennes. Her cork has just disappeared with the rush of a foolish goujon, and is straightway pulled up, amid screams from the excited demoiselle, with a jerk sufficient to land a whale. At her side a man of thirty-five, sunburned, well-built and immaculate in white flannels, is extricating the unfortunate goujon from the tangled hook and line.

“Oh! c’est beau! n’est-ce pas, Jacques?” cries Yvette, clapping her hands.

“Oui, oui, ma petite,” returns Jacques, happy over her delight.

“Et toi, chÉri,” laughs Yvette, consolingly, “tu n’as encore rien attrappÉ, Ça ne fait rien, je te donnerai le mien.”

The old gentleman with the scarlet tie rises and bows majestically to Yvette in recognition of her skill.

A short pantomime follows, in which these two bons garÇons present her with a wreath of honor made of leaves gathered from the bank.

“Ah! mes enfants,” cries Yvette, “you are always so good to me!” and she kisses the old gentleman in quite a fatherly way on both cheeks and gives her beloved Jacques a little hug of delight. Then all three return seriously to their fishing.

Now the shutters of an upper window of the villa open and the blond head of Suzanne is thrust out in greeting.

“Bonjour, mes enfants!” she calls cheerily to the three.

“Ah! ah! Oh! oh! tiens! it is really you at last!” cry the industrious ones.

“Oh! you lazy girl,” shouts Jacques.

“Bonjour,” adds the old gentleman in mock sarcasm. “It is a pity you are so confoundedly lazy that you can not give us the honor of your gracious company! A fine fisherwoman you, who swore last night by Psyche you would be up before the sun had crept over yonder hillock and kissed the river with its rays!”

“Tout À l’heure, mon vieux,” returns Suzanne, with a rippling laugh. “The day is yet young; au revoir, mes enfants.” And Suzanne, extricating one dimpled elbow from her peignoir, blows the three enthusiasts a kiss and closes the shutters.

“Ingrate!” cry all three.

“Eh! do you hear?” roars Jacques, “we have Chambertin for lunch—you shall not have a drop.”

“Dormeuse!” shouts Yvette. “You shall not see Gaston when he comes, or even the tail of my beautiful goujon!”

“Enough,” thunders the old gentleman, melodramatically, “you shall not leave your boudoir, not even tho the populace cry ‘The Queen! the Queen! let us see the Queen!’ Consider it henceforth as your dungeon. I have given orders to the guards without.” The shutters open half way.

“Has anyone caught anything!” ventures shyly the owner of the shower of golden hair.

“One!” savagely reply the others.

“Who caught it?” comes excitedly from the window.

“Yvette!”

“Bravo!” applauds Suzanne. “I am coming down!” And she does, making her way through the roses. Her exquisite hair is twisted in a hurried coil. The voluminous sleeves of her peignoir reveal her pretty bare arms as she runs. The next instant Suzanne is in the barge fishing with the rest.

Bees drone lazily over the flowers in the tiny garden; the river flashes in the warm sun; a carillon of bells from a breezy belfry on the hillside strikes noon, and the four enthusiasts pull up their lines and go to dÉjeuner.

A table in the garden is laid for eight. Marie, Suzanne’s bonne, is drying the salad vigorously in its wire cage. In a cool corner the cobwebbed bottles of Chambertin sleep in their baskets.

The train has brought Gaston and his friend, a young officer. An automobile growls and sputters up the villa with the leading villain of a Parisian theater, a man full of kindly good humor, accompanied by a graceful woman with jet-black hair, a danseuse. It is Tuesday, there is no matinÉe and every one is happy.

And how gay they are! how full of spirit and rollicking camaraderie! How many toasts are drank, how many clever songs are sung during the whole of this bohemian breakfast! The officer and Jacques move the short upright piano close to the table. Suzanne, now the pink of neatness, with a little laugh mounts a chair, raises her glass through which the light glints as golden as her hair, and sings the aria from Charpentier’s “Louise.” The small company are silent in ecstasy under the spell of her mellow voice. The lines of smoke rising from the cigarettes seem like fires of incense burning in adoration of this fascinating little goddess whose golden heart has made her a rare good comrade.

And so with song and story the dÉjeuner ends. There is no more fishing. Yvette and Jacques go for a walk; the danseuse and the villain start in their tuff-tuff back to Paris; the old gentleman with the scarlet tie takes a nap; Suzanne and Gaston row down the river, and the officer returns to his barracks. Only when the moon floods the garden with its light do the lovers return. In the garden the roses pale in the glow of candles from the windows of the villa, nodding their heads sleepily in the night breeze. A bat zigzags over the tops of the hollyhocks; two little birds high up in the tree peep their last good-night. Dinner is at eight.

Past this rural paradise the silent river glides and tells no tales.

I pulled up my anchor and rowed back to the inn. The villa with its happy day had fascinated me.

There must be hundreds of others like it along the Seine, I argued. That night I made up my mind to take a trip in a rowboat down to Rouen.

I was warned, by my good landlord of the inn, that such a voyage would be fraught with untold hardships and danger.

“And in what way?” I asked.

“Ah! monsieur, there are the locks, and, when the wind blows, the river gets very rough. Monsieur should take a brave and strong marin with him to make such a journey.”

“Have you ever been down the Seine?”

“Only once, monsieur, on a canal-boat with my brother-in-law to Mantes, where he became cook to a famous hostelry. It was he who came yesterday and made the sauce to the sole you have just eaten.”

I bowed my compliments. If his seamanship was as good as his cooking, the brother-in-law could have commanded a man-of-war.

In the matter of finding a suitable boat I experienced some difficulty. There were many to be had, painted sky-blue or apple-green, and bearing romantic names like Juliette or Gabrielle, but their sea-going qualities were none of the best, and moreover most of them leaked badly. They might have done for half-an-hour’s belle promenade with Marcelle or CÉleste, but I doubted their worthiness for the perilous adventure from which my friend the innkeeper had tried to dissuade me.

I was told that at Bougival I would surely find what I desired. My time was getting short and I took the train there to inquire. Visions of light, perfectly appointed canoes filled my mind as I got off at the station. I could almost see them lying by dozens snubbed to dapper wharves ready to be rented. The river flashed in the warm sun and swung under cool archways. The people whom I passed on my way through the village looked nautical enough. I stopped the likeliest looking one as I crossed the bridge, a bronzed, thick-set man wearing a sailor’s cap.

“Can I rent a rowboat here, monsieur?” I asked.

He looked at me in a dazed sort of way, then, shaking the ashes from his stubby pipe, became lost in thought. Had you asked him for a balloon he could not have been more puzzled.

“A rowboat,” I reiterated.

“Ah! monsieur, un bateau À rames, ah! that is difficult. The miller used to have one a year ago, but he sold it.”

I walked along down the river in the direction of Pont de Chatou, through waving fields of wheat gay with scarlet poppies. Suddenly in the distance I saw the lateen sail of a canoe showing above the bank. Another half mile and I had reached the bridge. Here several rowboats were drawn up to a float in front of the workshop of a constructeur. The builder himself came out to greet me. He was a pleasant little man and seemed much interested when I told him what I wanted. He motioned me to follow him and, unlocking the door of a barnlike structure, ushered me in. Suspended from the ceiling hung a score of racing boats and shells, the property of a Parisian boat club. Tucked away in a corner of the floor I saw my boat! A St. Lawrence canoe, clinker-built and perfect in all its appointments.

“Where the devil did you get this?” I cried.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“It belongs to the gentleman whose chÂteau you passed on the river. He brought it from America himself.”

My spirits fell.

“Will he rent it?” I asked.

“Ah! monsieur, I do not know, but you could ask him. He is the head of a famous firm in Paris,” and he gave me his address.

The concierge who ushered me the following day into the private office of the head of the firm in question, informed me that monsieur would see me in half an hour. Could I wait? At the end of this time monsieur, an imposing looking man with a red ribbon in his buttonhole, entered the room with all the ceremonious courtesy found among Parisian men of affairs.

We both bowed low and he motioned me to a Louis XVI. chair.

“Now, monsieur, I am at your disposal.”

I explained to him that I had not come to transact affairs affecting the credit of Russia or to merge anything of any kind.

“Then it is not in business that I have the honor of your visit, monsieur?”

“Monsieur,” I said, “I simply want to rent your boat.”

“Tiens, have I a boat?”

“Yes,” I reminded him, “at the builder’s, below your country place at Chatou.”

“Ah! yes,” and he laughed heartily. “Yes! yes! so I have, I had almost forgotten it; it has been so long since I have been there. It was the green one you liked?”

“No! no, the American canoe,” I explained.

“Ah! parfaitement! But, monsieur, that is not mine; it belongs to my brother. He left town yesterday, but you could write him here explaining what you wish and I will leave it here on his desk.”

He touched an electric button over an escritoire, and left me with a low bow. I began to write. I had just slipped the note in its envelope when his brother entered unexpectedly—a placid gentleman with a well-trimmed beard.

“Monsieur,” I began in my rapid French, “it is for the difficulty of having to find a boat of oars that I have become desolate that has inspired me to come to you to ask you to rent me yours which I find of the type ravishing to my eyes as well as practical to the voyage.”

He smiled pleasantly as I talked on, putting his hand to his ear. At last he spoke in a high-keyed, monotonous voice.

“Monsieur, the lady whom you speak of I am not acquainted with.”

“It is not a lady!” I replied in my best megaphone French. “It is a boat, your canoe, at Chatou; want to rent it?”

His face brightened at last, I thought.

“Ah! the little canoe AmÉricain. But it is not mine, monsieur, it belongs to my brother Achille. He is out of town.”

I thanked him, left the note and bowed myself out, saving my more intricate vocabulary for the open air. Three days later I received the following answer:

“Monsieur,

“I am truly desolate, I beg of you to believe me, not to be able to acquiesce to your amiable request, but it will be impossible for me to rent my St. Lawrence skiff. I hope sincerely you can find what you wish. Might I suggest hunting at AsniÈres? If I am not intruding, let me advise you, monsieur, to take for that delightful little voyage so Arcadian, a strong rope of thirty meters and a gaff which will prove useful in going through the locks.

“Permit me to express to you again, sir, my very sincere regrets and the assurance of my distinguished sentiments.

Finally, just outside of Paris, at AsniÈres, in the workshop of a constructeur de bateaux, Monsieur Malo Lebreton, I discovered an excellent boat, brand-new, but rather heavy and flat-bottomed. Both of these seeming defects, however, proved advantages before the end of the trip. A short portable mast carried a leg-of-mutton sail, which I hoisted one sunny afternoon, and left AsniÈres, with a fair wind driving me along under old bridges and past little islands in the direction of Argenteuil.

Rounding the edge of a wooded island, a weird object came floating toward me, silhouetted against the copperish red disk of the setting sun. It was a strange craft, a short squat boat sunk deep in the water, carrying a black lugger sail, and steered by an old man grizzled and bent with age. A tawny, yellowish mass was loaded across the middle of the boat. As it drew nearer, I saw the body of a lioness, her head resting on her great paws. She was dead. Her long life of captivity had ended in the menagerie of some fÊte foraine down the river. Here was a breath of the twilight air and the cool smell of the fresh woods and freedom, but for her they were too late. Father Time was steering her down the golden river to her grave. As she drifted close by, the old man neither spoke nor raised his eyes. Slowly the boat of the dead drifted by, and the bend of the river hid it from view.

The fair wind, which so far had driven me before it, suddenly changed, and for hours the boat crept against a head wind that roused itself into a stiff river gale and slapped the tops of running waves across the bow. The breeze held its position so persistently for a succeeding one hundred and fifty miles, that often it was a daily fight to keep from shore.

So tortuous is the course of the Seine, so many twists and turns does it take to reach a few kilometers nearer the sea, that the excellent chart supplied by the nautical journal, “Le Yacht,” looks like the track of a snake in a box.

I managed to reach Argenteuil that night.

Near the picturesque bridge there was the comfortable inn of Le Drapeau—jolly, as I entered, with a bourgeois wedding supper. The party had arrived from Paris in high two-wheeled carts filled with chairs. These lumbering festival vehicles were stowed under the shed of the courtyard, while, as a precaution against the upsetting of a friendly glass of wine, many of the women present had hung their overskirts in a barn adjoining. It was late when the guests departed, and during the remainder of the night other high two-wheeled carts rumbled by, loaded with vegetables for the Paris halles, and shaking the very ground as they passed. When I awoke, two automobiles were cooling under the shed, and a partie carrÉe of smartly dressed Parisians had ordered breakfast under one of the pretty kiosks in the garden.

It was Sunday, and the waiters were hurrying about setting extra tables for the expected guests. Soon smart traps and bourgeois carts began to arrive, the horses being unharnessed and led from the shafts in front of the little tables.

The landlord whose dual role of cook and proprietor kept him as busy as the innkeeper in a comic opera, bustled among his guests or flew to his kitchen, to look after his poulets and his sauces.

Rich fields and stretches of woodland rolled back of the inn to the river, still whipped white by the gale and dotted with scudding sharpie-like canoes which had ventured out from a neighboring boat club.

The wind having abated the next day, I pushed down the river, past barges and iron foundries and rows of steam tow-boats, of which there are many plying between Paris and Rouen, moored to the shore.

These tow-boats were iron-clad and painted red. They were propelled by an endless chain arrangement jutting from bow to stern, which rattled as it cut the water. A little below this point, the character of the river changes. Quiet backwaters sheltered flocks of ducks and wild doves. By noon I reached the “Ile Jolie,” a cozy restaurant under shady green trees. It had a ballroom whose walls had been decorated by a clever caricature of a wedding procession, the payment, no doubt, for some bohemian supper of long ago, when madame the proprietress was young and the good comrade of idle painters.

Now its clientÈle has changed, and the scow used as a ferry is shouted for from the opposite bank by Parisians with a fondness for game and champagne.

“It must be lonely here in the winter?” I venture.

“No, indeed, monsieur; on the contrary, it is quite gay.” And she added with a twinkle of her eye, “They come in the winter to show their furs.”

Below the “Ile Jolie” lie more long, quiet stretches, smooth backwaters flowing past feathery green islands full of cooing wild pigeons. As I round a point, a blue heron squawks and rises lazily, his long legs dangling. Farther on, a pair of black ducks scurry out of a hidden cove.

At sundown I glide under the bridge at Pont de Chatou. Here, as everywhere else along the Seine, there are people fishing. Often, all that is visible are the spider-webs of lines which lead from the water into the brush along the banks; but at the end of each thread buried in the tangle is some itinerant disciple of the patient Izaak.

A little below all this I carry over a narrow bit of land to avoid the lock at Bougival. Here the Seine resembles somewhat the Thames. Fine estates with formal gardens run to the edge of the river. Cedar boats gay in colored cushions and silk parasols are drawn under shady trees, the nooks of idling house parties. From the walls of one country place the butler is fishing in his spare half hour before dinner. The gateway to this estate is protected by an iron grille bearing in gilt the crest of the family. A smart coupÉ passes, driven by a cockaded coachman.

At dusk the forbidding settlement of Pecq came into view, a sordid collection of gray houses harboring a wretched combination of a hotel and tobacco-shop. Above Pecq towers the forest plateau of St. Germain, with its palace and balustrades and terraces faced with long avenues of trees strung out like the wings of an advancing army, and having an effect which smacks of the fancies of an extravagant court.

Here from the Pavilion Henri IV., where chic Paris drives to dÎner, one sees the Seine glistening far below—a vein of silver running through a vast undulating ocean of trees.

I stop at Maison for dÉjeuner the next day, and find the proprietress of a river-side cafÉ washing in the public lavoir. However, she leaves her suds and scrubbing-board with the best of humor, and hurries to her kitchen, whence she emerges a few minutes later with a smoking omelet, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine.

“Monsieur will excuse my larder, but we get ready for Parisians on Sundays.”

“Then you have a big crowd on that day?”

“Ah! monsieur, quel monde!” and she went hurrying back to her kitchen, with her honest face beaming.

The character of the people becomes more primitive. I row on past La Frette, a red-and-white town snug against a hillside checkered with vineyards. At evening I reach Herblay, and a quaint inn with a tiled kitchen shining in polished copper. The town is very small, very crooked and very old. Boat-loads of peasants, many of them in coats of sheepskins, returned at evening from their work in the fields.

It takes a week to reach Havre from Paris by tow. At the locks tow-lines are slipped and the procession drifts into the big basins by twos. Slowly the iron gates close, and the boats sink gradually to the lower level. As slowly the gates open at the other end; tow-lines are rehitched, and the procession goes on its way. By the side of the big lock there is a narrower one for the passing through of smaller craft. This, for a few sous, the lockman will grind open for you. But more often you arrive in time to go through at the tail end of a tow and without the slightest trouble. Evidently the dangers of the locks existed only in the mind of my landlord at Poissy, which town now lay just below.

It takes barely an hour to reach Poissy from Paris by train, but by the twisting Seine it is a long way.

It seemed good to get to the Esturgeon again. The veranda overhanging the river was already crowded with Parisians, and every automobile that thundered over the bridge brought more.

Chateaubriands smothered in mushrooms were being served by hurrying waiters. Roast ducks and patÉs came from the busy kitchen. Champagne frappÉed itself in silver coolers, and older wines slumbered in cradles.

Beneath the veranda flowed the Seine, inky black in the night, and framed by a mass of towering trees that would have graced a Corot. Now and then a returning fishing-boat wrinkled the surface of the dark water, while the boat-lantern was reflected in ribbons of light in the depths of the stream.

The next morning I passed the tiny villa where the jolly breakfast had occurred. It was closed; roses still bloomed in the tangled garden; a sign over the porch read: “À louer.”

The Bouffes-Parisiennes had opened.