_gamins_,
who would teaze a boat to pieces if not looked after; but it is always
against the grain with me to be strict with boys, especially about boats,
for I hold that it is a good sign of them when they relish nautical
curiosities.

CHAPTER VII.

Dull reading--Chain boat--Kedging--St. Cloud--Training-Dogs--Wrong
colours--My policeman--Yankee notion.--Red, White, and Blue.

The effect of living on board a little boat for a month at a time without
more than three or four nights of usual repose, was to bring the mind and
body into a curious condition of subdued life, a sort of contemplative
oriental placid state in which both cares and pleasures ceased to be
acute, and the flight of time seemed gliding and even, and not marked by
the distinct epochs which define our civilised life. Although this
passive enjoyment was really agreeable--and, in fine weather and good
health, perhaps a mollusc could affirm as much of its
existence,--certainly an experience of the condition I have described
enables one to understand what is evidently the normal state of many
thousands of hard-worked, ill-fed, and irregularly-sleeped labourers; the
men who, sitting down thus weary at night, we expect to read some prosy
book full of desperately good advice, of which one half the words are not
needed for the sense and the other half are not understood by the reader.
{98}

The last tug-boat we had to use was of a peculiar kind, and I am not
aware that it is employed upon any of our rivers in Britain. A chain is
laid along the bottom of the Seine for (I think) two hundred miles. At
certain hours of the day a long solidly-built vessel with a powerful
engine on board comes over this, and the chain is seized and put round a
wheel on board. By turning this wheel one way or the other it is evident
that the chain will be wound up and let down behind, while it cannot slip
along the river's bottom--the enormous friction is enough to prevent
that, and therefore the boat is wound up and goes through the water. The
power of this chain-boat is so great that it will pull along, and that
too against the rapid stream, a whole string of barges, several of them
of 300 tons' burthen. The long fleet advances steadily though slowly,
and the irresistible engine works with smokeless funnels, but there are
groanings within, telling of tight-strained iron, and earnest undertoned
breathings of confined steam.

Although the chain-boat is not often st