as
always beside the water, on the water, or in the water. He must have been
born in a boat, and he will certainly die in a boat at the last.

One evening as we were walking along the banks of the Seine I asked him
to tell me some stories about his life on the water. The good man at once
became animated, his whole expression changed, he became eloquent, almost
poetical. There was in his heart one great passion, an absorbing,
irresistible passion-the river.

Ah, he said to me, how many memories I have, connected with that river
that you see flowing beside us! You people who live in streets know
nothing about the river. But listen to a fisherman as he mentions the
word. To him it is a mysterious thing, profound, unknown, a land of
mirages and phantasmagoria, where one sees by night things that do not
exist, hears sounds that one does not recognize, trembles without knowing
why, as in passing through a cemetery--and it is, in fact, the most
sinister of cemeteries, one in which one has no tomb.

The land seems limited to the river boatman, and on dark nights, when
there is no moon, the river seems limitless. A sailor has not the same
feeling for the sea. It is often remorseless and cruel, it is true; but
it shrieks, it roars, it is honest, the great sea; while the river is
silent and perfidious. It does not speak, it flows along without a sound;
and this eternal motion of flowing water is more terrible to me than the
high waves of the ocean.

Dreamers maintain that the sea hides in its bosom vast tracts of blue
where those who are drowned roam among the big fishes, amid strange
forests and crystal grottoes. The river has only black depths where one
rots in the slime. It is beautiful, however, when it sparkles in the
light of the rising sun and gently laps its banks covered with whispering
reeds.

The poet says, speaking of the ocean,

"O waves, what mournful tragedies ye know
--Deep waves, the dread of kneeling mothers' hearts!
Ye tell them to each other as ye roll
On flowing tide, and this it is that gives
The sad despairing tones unto your voice
As on ye roll at eve by mounting tide."

Well, I think that the stories whispered by the slender reeds, with their
little soft voices, must be more sinister than the lugubrious tragedies
told by the roaring of the waves.

But as you have asked for some of my recollections, I will tell you of a
singular adventure that happened to me ten years ago.

I w