t table--as I inferred not less
from his look and manner than from his ostentatiously professed
ignorance of his native tongue--was an English duke in reduced
circumstances; and his assistants, I fancy, were retired French
senators. Indeed, those dignified functionaries had about them an air of
high comedy so irresistible, and so many of the ladies whom they served
were personages of the Odeon or the Comedie Francaise, that only the
smell of the coffee saved the scene from lapsing into the unrealism of
the realistic stage.

Seven o'clock came, but the _Gladiateur_ remained passive. At the
gang-plank were assembled the responsible heads of the expedition--who
were anything but passive. They all were talking at once, and all were
engaged in making gestures expressive of an important member of the
party who had been especially charged to be on hand in ample time; who
had outraged every moral principle by failing to keep his appointment;
whose whereabouts could not be even remotely surmised; whose absence was
the equivalent of ruin and despair--a far less complex series of
concepts, I may add, than a southern Frenchman is capable of expressing
with his head and his body and his hands.

It was the pianist.

A grave Majoral, reaching down to the kernel of the matter, solved the
difficulty with the question: "Have we the piano?"

"We have."

"Enough!" cried the Majoral. "Let us go."

In a moment the gang-plank was drawn aboard; the lines were cast off;
the great paddle-wheels began to turn; the swift current laid hold upon
us--and the _Gladiateur_, slipping away from the bank, headed for the
channel-arch of the Pont-du-Midi. The bridge was thronged with our
friends of Lyons come down to say good-bye to us. Above the parapet
their heads cut sharp against the morning glitter of the sun-bright sky.
All together they cheered us as we, also cheering, shot beneath them:
and then the bridge, half hidden in the cloud of smoke from our huge
funnel, was behind us--and our voyage was begun.

III

Of all the rivers which, being navigable, do serious work in the world
the Rhone is the most devil-may-care and light-hearted. In its five
hundred mile dash down hill from the Lake of Geneva to the Mediterraenean
its only purpose--other than that of doing all the mischief
possible--seems to be frolic fun. And yet for more than two thousand
years this apparently frivolous, and frequently malevolent, river has
been very usefully emplo