ofs making a general effect of warm
greys and yellows dashed with the bright greens of shrubs and trees and
gardens and the yellow green of vines. 'Tis a town of some commercial
pretensions: the gateway of a canal a dozen miles long leading up
through the valley of the little river Gier to iron-works and
coke-works and glass-works tucked away in the hills. The canal was
projected almost a century and a half ago as a connecting channel
between the Rhone and the Loire, and so between the Atlantic and the
Mediterraenean; wherefore the Canal of the Two Oceans was, and I suppose
continues to be, its high-sounding name. But the Revolution came, and
the digging never extended beyond that first dozen miles; and thus it is
that the Canal of the Two Oceans, as such, is a delusion, and that the
golden future which once lay ahead of Givors now lies a long way astern.
Yet the town has an easy and contented look: as though it had saved
enough from the wreck of its magnificent destiny to leave it still
comfortably well to do.

Before we fairly had passed it, and while the farandole was dying out
slowly, there crashed down upon us a thunderous outburst of song: as
though an exceptionally large-lunged seraph were afloat immediately
above us in the open regions of the air. Yet the song was of a gayer
sort than seraphs, presumably, are wont to sing; and its method,
distinctly, was that of the modern operatic stage. In point of fact,
the singer was not a seraph, but an eminent professor in a great
institution of learning and a literary authority of the first
rank--whose critical summary of French literature is a standard, and
whose studies of Beaumarchais and Le Sage have been crowned by the
Academy. In sheer joyousness of spirit that eminent personage had
betaken himself to the top of the port paddle-box, and thence was
suffering his mountain-cleaving voice to go at large: so quickening was
the company in which he found himself; so stimulating was the racy
fervour of his own Southern sun!

IV

From Givors the river runs almost in a straight line to Vienne. On both
shores rise round-crested wooded hills--the foothills of the parallel
ranges of mountains by which the wide valley is shut in. Down this
perspective, commandingly upon a height, is seen the city--misty and
uncertain at first, but growing clearer and clearer, as the boat nears
it, until the stone-work of man and the rock-work of nature become
distinct and the picture is com