-3RARY 
 
 RSITY OF 
 ' ORNIA 
 r )IEGO
 
 THE UNKNOWN RIVER. 
 
 AN ETCHERS VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY. 
 
 Illustrations, 
 
 ETCHED FROM NATURE BY THE AUTHOR.
 
 I 
 
 THE 
 
 UNKNOWN 
 
 BY 
 
 PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. 
 
 Iltuslratctj fag tije &utfjor. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1872.
 
 of 
 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON', 
 
 Cambridge.
 
 TO 
 
 THE REV. HORATIO N. POWERS, D.D., 
 
 RECTOR OF ST. JOHN'S, CHICAGO, 
 
 One of the most valued of many kind friends 
 in America, 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME.
 
 PREFACE 
 TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 
 
 TN the revival of the too long neglected art of 
 -*- etching, we who in England and France have 
 tried to recover the right use of the needle, have 
 had to contend against many difficulties; and little 
 of what we have hitherto done can be considered 
 more than tentative and experimental. Etching, 
 however, has this advantage over line-engraving, 
 that the comparatively rapid and spontaneous 
 nature of the process, and its purely artistic and 
 intellectual aims, obtain indulgence for many im- 
 perfections which would not be tolerated in a craft 
 professing great mechanical finish. In etching, the 
 spirit of the work is of more consequence than 
 manual accuracy, and I have therefore allowed 
 several plates to be published in this series, in 
 which the manual work is rude, because they 
 expressed my meaning, though in a rough way. 
 Nearly all the plates in this series indeed, the 
 whole of the landscape subjects were etched
 
 viii Preface to the American Edition. 
 
 directly from nature, often under circumstances 
 very different from the convenient surroundings of 
 an engraver's table at home, with rain pouring 
 over the plate, or daylight rapidly declining, joined 
 to serious apprehensions about passing some dan- 
 gerous rapid before I could get to a village inn, or 
 find shelter beneath the thatch of some humble 
 hamlet, nestled in a nook of the wooded and rocky 
 shore. Hence they are literally no more- than the 
 notes of impressions which an artist takes in his 
 memorandum book. As for the two or three sub- 
 jects in which the author himself appears, it may 
 be remarked that, as he could notflose and draw at 
 the same time, there was a peculiar difficulty in 
 these attempts, which the author, from want of 
 practice in figure drawing, could scarcely be ex- 
 pected to overcome. A friend of mine, who is a 
 figure-painter by profession, kindly made one or 
 two slight sketches as helps; but, as the artist 
 in question belonged to the severest French classi- 
 cal school (with which, as an artist, I have no 
 affinity whatever, though as a critic I admire much 
 of what it has accomplished), his sketches were 
 conceived in a temper so opposed to mine that 
 they turned out to be of no use for this particular 
 purpose. Dog Tom was introduced at the urgent 
 request of an unknown correspondent whose love 
 of dogs touched the author in a tender place, and
 
 Preface to the American Edition. ix 
 
 made him, somewhat rashly, turn animal-designer 
 for the occasion. American critics are therefore 
 requested to remember that the figures and dog 
 are thrown in, as it were, simply for the reader's 
 amusement, and not with any ambitious artistic 
 pretensions. 
 
 However, such as they are, it has been the good 
 fortune of these little plates to please many people 
 in Europe, and amongst them a few more than 
 ordinarily fastidious and capable judges. This 
 may be attributed to the fact that in etching them 
 the artist worked without the least reference to 
 criticism of any kind, in the simple enjoyment of 
 one of the pleasantest artistic expeditions imagina- 
 ble. Indeed, although working very hard the 
 whole time, I was under the delusion it may be 
 strictly said, labored under the delusion that the 
 voyage was a perfect holiday, a belief that was 
 greatly encouraged by an absolute indecision as to 
 which plates should be published and which de- 
 stroyed. Another piece of luck was, that I had 
 no time, nor acid, to bite the plates there and then, 
 and so innocently fancied that they were all very 
 pretty (an etching done according to the old nega- 
 tive process always looks pretty when it is first 
 drawn, because the lines glitter charmingly on the 
 black ground), and felt agreeably encouraged, the 
 evil hour of disappointment being put off until my
 
 x Preface to the American Edition. 
 
 return to home and the printing press, which told 
 the painful truth with a frankness equal to that 
 of the most unpleasantly honest dilettante in Eng- 
 land. 
 
 It may interest readers who share the author's 
 boating propensities to know that the voyage was 
 undertaken in a canoe fabricated by 'his own hands 
 of paper, on a light skeleton of laths. The whole 
 of the voyage was accomplished in this fragile 
 craft; but it is only honest to add that she became 
 leaky before it was over, and was condemned as 
 unriverworthy at the end. Not that I think, even 
 now, that paper is a bad material for canoes, but I 
 had not then (1866) hit upon the right material 
 for gluing it. I employed the enduit Ruolz, which 
 takes about twelve months to harden, and I had 
 not patience to wait the twelve months; so the 
 sheets or bands of paper did not really adhere, and 
 the water oozed between them after a while. The 
 proper gum to use for fastening paper so as to 
 resist water is simply a strong solution of shell-lac 
 in spirits of wine. I have a canoe at present and 
 two small punts which are made of thin wood, 
 lined with paper, applied with shell-lac. When a 
 leak shows itself it is stopped at once with a bit of 
 paper and a touch of the solution, which dries 
 immediately. An English oarsman tells me that 
 for the last two years he has used bits of calico
 
 Preface to the American Edition. xi 
 
 with the same solution in an old wooden canoe, 
 which remains serviceable, thanks to the shell-lac. 
 One result of the voyage narrated in this volume, 
 was the invention of a machine which is a punt by 
 day on the water, and a hut by night on shore, 
 large enough to stretch a hammock in. The 
 American reader will no doubt pardon an allusion 
 to these fancies, and believe them compatible with 
 serious work in other ways. If it is boyish to like 
 boating, in all its forms (as some grave and wise 
 men seem to imagine), I hope to remain puerile 
 yet a little longer. The cold sapience of age comes 
 on rapidly enough to all of us; and it is not a mis- 
 fortune to be able still to feel an irrational delight 
 in a canoe when she glides in safety, and an impru- 
 dent indifference when she upsets. 
 
 The verses at the beginning of this book were 
 written during the late war, in anticipation of an 
 attack from the Germans, which took place shortly 
 afterwards; and I witnessed the combat for many 
 hours on the banks of the river, between Garibaldi, 
 who defended Autun, and a strong body of Bavari- 
 ans who attacked it, not exactly the moment for 
 descending the river in a paper canoe! Another 
 chapter was added that day to the long history of 
 that ancient city by the Arroux; and as I watched 
 the flight of the shells in the clear December air, 
 and saw, beneath the moon, the fiery tongues dart-
 
 xii Preface to the American Edition. 
 
 ing from the mouths of the enemy's guns, I thought 
 of many a former siege in times when war was less 
 noisy and less bloody, but more cruelly protracted. 
 How little I imagined, when writing the chapter 
 about Augustodunum in this book, that I should 
 see an army in battle array drawn up against it, a 
 dark, thick line of Germans with cannon glittering 
 at intervals! Yet once again the Roman wall rang 
 in echoes to the war-trumpet, and once again the 
 river was stained with blood!
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 THE GATE-TOWER AT CHASEUX Title. 
 
 ON THE TERNIN i 
 
 PRE CHARMOY 2 
 
 MILLERY 5 
 
 VOUDENAY-LE-CHATEAU 8 
 
 DANGER AHEAD 1 1 
 
 NEAR VOUDENAY 12 
 
 A DIFFICULT PLACE 13 
 
 CROSSING A FIELD 15 
 
 CHATEAU OF IGORNAY 17 
 
 CATHEDRAL AND BISHOP'S PALACE, AUTUN 19 
 
 TOWERS OF AUTUN 21 
 
 GENETOIE 23 
 
 NEAR ORNAY 26 
 
 CASTLE OF CHASEUX 28 
 
 THE MOAT OF CHASEUX 29 
 
 TWILIGHT ON THE RIVER 30 
 
 OLD HOUSES AT ETANG 31 
 
 BETWEEN ETANG AND ST. NISIER 35 
 
 GREAT OAK OF ST. NISIER 36 
 
 MILL AT ST. NISIER 38 
 
 ROCKS AT ST. NISIER 41 
 
 BLOST 43
 
 xiv List of Illustrations. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BETWEEN BLOST AND LABOULAYE 44 
 
 LABOULAYE 46 
 
 ROCK IN MIDSTREAM 50 
 
 RECUANGE 1 51 
 
 RECUANGE II 53 
 
 TOULON-SUR-ARROUX 54 
 
 THE BRIDGE OF TOULON 55 
 
 ROCHE MALADROITE 58 
 
 GUEUGNON 61 
 
 SEEKING SHELTER 63 
 
 A NIGHT IN THE CANOE 64 
 
 PORTRAIT OF TOM 66 
 
 BRIDGE OF DIGOIN 68 
 
 RIVER SHORE NEAR DIGOIN 69
 
 The wild rain drives in gusty showers, 
 And past the moon the storm-clouds fly. 
 The river, rising, hurries by 
 
 The gray ' old city of fair towers? 
 
 The bayonets gleam in all her streets : 
 All hearts are anxious, homes are sad 
 Oh, when shall victory make them glad, 
 
 And light the faces that one meets? 
 
 O River ! once so fair and clear, 
 Now dark as death thy currents flow; 
 They may be reddened who can know?- 
 
 Before the closing of the year. 
 
 O River ! made for my delight, 
 I see upon thy wintry flood 
 A floating corpse a streak of blood, 
 
 And flames reflected in the night ! 
 
 October, 1870.
 
 THE UNKNOWN RIVER. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON a bright afternoon in autumn I lay on the green 
 bank of a little stream. The stream was so little 
 that my dog Tom cleared it at one bound, as in the eager 
 excitement of a wildly impossible chase he rushed after 
 flying game. Of course he never yet caught a bird on 
 the wing, but his faith in the practicability of such an 
 achievement does not seem to be in the least shaken by 
 the discouraging lessons of a constantly recurring expe- 
 rience. Only a peregrine falcon, strong-winged, sharp- 
 taloned, could follow and slay those partridges, but Tom 
 dashes after them through and over all manner of obsta- 
 cles, hoping, by perseverance, to attain his object, like 
 the man who ran after the express train. 
 
 Tom is a dog of immense energy when out of doors, 
 and the most listless indolence at home. He will run a 
 hundred miles in a day, or swim fifteen, but he will not 
 walk across the room without the most elaborate prepara- 
 tion in the way of stretchings which he believes to be 
 necessary, and when the little distance is at last accom- 
 plished he falls down with a grunt as if extenuated by 
 fatigue. Another peculiarity of his is the wonderful 
 difference in the state of his affections, for when in the 
 open air he is in the highest degree grateful for the least
 
 2 The Unknown River. 
 
 word or gesture of his master, and very demonstrative 
 himself, whereas in the studio, where he passes too many 
 tedious hours, he has scarcely ever been known to ac- 
 knowledge a caress even by one movement of his tail. 
 He is by race a setter, and seemed destined to a sporting 
 career, but, as his master's fowling-piece has not been used 
 for some years, Tom's instincts are quite undisciplined, 
 and though in outward appearance the finest setter in the 
 whole neighborhood, so that all sportsmen stop and 
 look at him when he passes by, he is a lamentable in- 
 stance of the consequences of a neglected education, and 
 almost any dog of the same breed is professionally his 
 superior, if only he has passed through a proper course 
 of discipline. 
 
 We digressed into this talk about Tom after saying 
 that he jumped over a brook. The brook murmurs over 
 the pebbles about a hundred yards lower down, and we 
 hear the refreshing sound coming on the faint, cool 
 breeze ; but the brook is very calm and quiet just here, 
 and washes its sandy banks with silent regularity, taking 
 the earth away grain by grain, an unceasing agent of 
 waste, and author of endless change. 
 
 There is no rest to faculties wearied by labor like rest 
 by a quiet stream, on a beautiful afternoon in summer. 
 If you distribute your work wisely, and are fortunate 
 enough to have work of a kind that may be done at your 
 own hours, you will take care, when the days are long, 
 to reserve some considerable part of the afternoon as 
 sacred to utter idleness, and if a quiet stream is within 
 an easy distance, there will you go and rest. Most men 
 under such circumstances take a rod and fish, but it does 
 not always happen that there is any thing which the dig- 
 nity of manhood may avow an interest in catching. The
 
 An Etchers Voyage of Discovery. 3 
 
 man who rents a salmon river in Scotland, or even the 
 Englishman whose trout stream is well preserved, may 
 go forth with the implements of the angler and a con- 
 sciousness of noble aims. But can anybody past boy- 
 hood pretend to take an interest in catching minnows, 
 unless, indeed, he be a Frenchman who has just landed 
 a goujon^ and is vain of the exploit? 
 
 It is curious how capable we all are of seeing people 
 and things every day of our lives without being once 
 prompted to ascertain any thing further about them, 
 whence they come, whither they go, what their past has 
 been, or what may be reserved for them in the future. 
 The inhabitants of great cities, being satiated by the con- 
 tinual sight of innumerable persons and things, have this 
 indifference in the most strongly developed form, but it 
 may be observed in the country with regard to what is 
 most commonly seen there. For instance, brooks and 
 streams are very commonly met with in all northern 
 countries, and therefore very few people ever give a 
 thought to the geography of them, or have any thing 
 beyond a very vague and general notion of their course. 
 The inhabitants of the region through which the stream 
 passes usually know it at bridges and fords, and farmers 
 know it where it eats away the land, and where, in times 
 of flood, it is most likely to leave a deposit of sand and 
 pebbles ; the angler, too, may have followed it for a few 
 miles, and some professional landscape-painter or ama- 
 teur may have explored a few of its most picturesque 
 parts. But no man living knows the whole stream, and 
 so there is always a great mystery about it, and any one 
 who cares to follow its course faithfully may enjoy all 
 the keen delights, and feel all the unceasing interest, 
 which belong to a true exploration.
 
 4 The Unknown River. 
 
 In this especial sense our little river is indeed unknown, 
 and as I lay idly on its bank on that bright autumn after- 
 noon, it occurred to me clearly for the first time that the 
 river came from far, and went yet farther, that it was not 
 confined to the fields about my house, and that' this little 
 scene was not a solitary gem, but one only of a thousand 
 links in a long chain of various and unimagined beauty. 
 
 Why had not this been equally clear to me years 
 before? Why do we dream ever in one place, or travel 
 by the same weary old roads, when infinite beauty and 
 novelty are open to us? It is because the beauty and 
 the novelty are so very near to us that we miss them, 
 and often so cheap that our pitiful small dignity despises 
 them as something puerile. When we are weary of the 
 monotony of life, and the whole human organism longs 
 for the refreshment of change, we would go to the end 
 of the earth, and in order to defeat our purposes as com- 
 pletely as possible, carry our habits with us. We are 
 accustomed to railways and newspapers, to bitter ale and 
 sweet tea, and we seek these things, and a thousand 
 others that habit has rendered necessary, wherever on 
 earth we go. And yet change more refreshing, and 
 novelty more complete are here within one day of slow- 
 est travel, than in journeys to Berlin and Vienna, for the 
 truest change and best novelty are not in length of travel, 
 but in the abandonment of habit, and especially in the 
 zest of free and personal discovery. 
 
 There is an unfortunate belief that this glorious pleas- 
 ure and passion of the discoverer are not now to be 
 enjoyed in Europe. It is supposed that since every State 
 in that region has been explored by many travellers, and 
 even more or less accurately surveyed by the makers of 
 maps, there is nothing new to be found there. The rea-
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 5 
 
 son for this appears to be a confusion between the genu- 
 ine pleasures of the discoverer and the satisfaction of his 
 pride. Of course there can be nothing to boast of in dis- 
 coveries such as those here narrated, but there is much 
 to be enjoyed. The explorer of a nameless European 
 river need not hope to be remembered like Livingstone 
 or Speke, but he may set forth in the full assurance of 
 finding much that is worth finding, and of enjoying 
 many of the sensations, deducting those connected with 
 personal vanity, which give interest to more famous 
 explorations. It is necessary, however, to the complete 
 enjoyment of an excursion of discovery, that the region 
 to be explored, whether mountain or river, or whatever 
 else it may be, should not have been already explored 
 by others, or at any rate not with the same objects and 
 intentions. A geologist has a certain satisfaction in 
 marching, hammer in hand, over a tract of country not 
 yet conquered for geology ; and an artist likes to sketch 
 in secluded valleys where it is not probable that any 
 artist has been before. On the same principle a traveller 
 who is fond of boating has an especial pleasure in de- 
 scending some stream of which it may be safely presumed 
 that nobody ever descended it in a boat. In this especial 
 sense there is much yet to be done in the way of explora- 
 tion, even in the most known countries. 
 
 No sooner had these ideas formed themselves in the 
 writer's mind, than the little stream by which he was 
 lazily reclining acquired a new importance, and the low 
 music of its shallows, instead of being, as formerly, the 
 lullaby of Mother Nature, became an awakening call 
 to action, and a promise of joyful change. A thousand 
 scenes rose rapidly before his mind, and the pipe which 
 had languidly yielded half an hour before the tiniest
 
 6 The Unknown River. 
 
 puffs of smoke to the fragrant air now gave dense 
 clouds, in which the smoker saw endless visions. He 
 saw the deep, calm pools under the rich overhanging 
 foliage where the currents fall asleep together, like tired 
 children that have filled the fields with their merry noise, 
 till weariness fell on their swift limbs, and hushed their 
 happy voices, and laid them in silent sleep under the 
 soft green leaves. He saw the rapids dashing into white 
 foam amongst the rocks, and the kingfisher glancing 
 above them like a sapphire-flash in the sun. He saw 
 the picturesque farms and cottages by the unfrequented 
 shore, the gray, deserted castles, the antique cities, 
 the remains of a thousand years. And then came the 
 majesty of the effects of nature, the splendor of the sun- 
 set and the promise of the dawn, the mysterious poetry 
 of summer twilight and the long hours alone beneath 
 the moon. 
 
 By this time it became impossible to remain quiet in 
 that place any longer. Tom was called back from his 
 vagrant courses and taken into his master's confidence. 
 Tom listened with the utmost attention whilst the novel 
 project was explained to him, and, although he may not 
 have clearly understood its details, he perceived at least 
 that action of some kind was meditated, and eagerly 
 expressed his willingness to take a share in it.
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 DURING the last few years the noble old art of etch- 
 ing has been revived by many painters. Some 
 of my friends have practised it with distinguished suc- 
 cess, and their example led me to recur to an art which I 
 had first attempted in boyhood, and then neglected for 
 many years. Of the means at my disposal for the illus- 
 tration of the projected voyage none seemed better than 
 etching, as it is the only kind of engraving which can be 
 done directly from nature, and the only engraving, too, 
 which has enough of the spirit of liberty to harmonize 
 with such a state of mind as that of a wandering canoist. 
 It accepts laborious finish when the artist has time for it, 
 but it also allows of rapid sketching when he is in a 
 hurry. So it was decided that the voyage should be 
 written, and that the illustrations should be etched from 
 nature on the way. 
 
 All the plates being prepared at home in my own 
 etching-room (nearly sixty of them), I laid them on 
 small drawing-boards, four to each board, and, by 
 means of two very small screws to each plate, fixed 
 them to the board so as to resist any jolting that they 
 might be exposed to. There was no necessity to pierce 
 the plates with holes to receive the screws, since, by 
 placing the screws near the edge of the copper, the 
 screw-heads held the plates firmly enough. I had pre-
 
 8 The Unknown River. 
 
 viously tried many experiments for the carriage of plates, 
 but none succeeded so well as this. If the coppers had 
 been all of precisely the same dimensions, they might 
 have been carried in a grooved box, such as photog- 
 raphers use for their glasses ; and this, no doubt, would 
 have been a considerable economy of space, and would, 
 at the same time, have saved the weight of all drawing- 
 boards except one.* 
 
 Having screwed my sixty plates to a quantity of small 
 drawing-boards, I slipped these boards into several 
 grooved boxes ; each box provided with a lock and 
 key. I then calculated the probable length of the voy- 
 age, and, having locked my boxes, sent them to inns at 
 different distances down the river, to await my arrival. 
 Thus I was never obliged to carry more than one box of 
 plates at a time. It is unnecessary to go into the detail 
 of my other preparations, which were of the kind now 
 so well known to canoe-men, and to all who take an in- 
 terest in canoe-travelling. 
 
 Here is the little village from which the expedition 
 started. The canoe had been transported thither in a 
 cart, and as we arrived in the evening it was not con- 
 sidered advisable to begin the voyage till the following 
 day. So I dined at the little inn, and after dinner went 
 out to walk in the village by the shore of the narrow riv- 
 ulet I was to embark upon on the morrow. 
 
 It was a clear, bright moonlight night (the etching, it 
 may be well to observe, is intended to represent a moon- 
 light) , and I wandered first about the river, and then in 
 a small valley between precipitous little hills. I was in 
 
 * It is necessary, however, when plates are carried in a grooved 
 box, without being fixed to a drawing-board, to revarnish their edges 
 before biting.
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 9 
 
 the heart of the Morvan, a highland district in the east 
 of France, almost unknown to tourists. The river to be 
 explored was the Arroux, that passes by the antique 
 Augustodunum, and flows to the historic Loire. No- 
 body had explored it yet, and all the hazards of the 
 enterprise rose before me as I leaned over the low para- 
 pet of the one-arched bridge at Voudenay. 
 
 The stream flowed under the bridge, after a curve like 
 a snake in the grass, a silvery snake glittering under the 
 moon. It came from a rustic mill, and the monotonous 
 noise of the mill-wheel was the only audible sound, ex- 
 cept the wash of the swift current on its pebbly margin. 
 Beyond the bridge the stream looked dark and treacher- 
 ous (for the moon was behind me then), and it went and 
 buried itself in a black wood. This was all that could 
 be seen of it from Voudenay. It was very narrow, and 
 wilful and swift, and it hurried away into the black 
 wood as if it had some deadly unavowable work to do 
 there, somebody to stifle and drown in the awful shade 
 of the forest. 
 
 What would this adventure bring me to? No man 
 knew the river, no man had ever known it. Its course 
 was full of dangers. A thousand strong boughs were 
 waiting for me, stretching their gnarled and knotty arms 
 across the stream. There were festoons of briers and 
 thorns, there were deep black pools hidden under the 
 intricate branches, there were roots in the river, and 
 lower down I had to expect sharp rocks also. But could 
 I not swim? Yes, in -water , but not amongst stones and 
 snags. Better the angry waves of the ocean, than these 
 treacherous suffocating snares ! 
 
 There was just so much of apprehension as sufficed 
 to give interest to the adventure. It amounted to a cer- 

 
 io The Unknown River. 
 
 tainty that I should be upset (probably more than once), 
 and have to struggle for dear life, but it was not so 
 certain that I should struggle for it unsuccessfully. I 
 returned to the little inn, and had a long talk with a set 
 of peasants, and then went to bed in a room that looked 
 out upon the river, the moonlight falling on the counter- 
 pane. The night was exquisitely calm, the peasants left 
 the inn, and all the house was still. 
 
 I have accustomed myself to do with what suffices for 
 the peasantry, and can therefore lodge in the poorest 
 country inn or cottage without any painful sense of pri- 
 vation. This is a valuable accomplishment for an ex- 
 plorer of unknown rivers, who may have to lodge very 
 simply from time to time. Thus, my first night I slept 
 in the same room with a farmer's boy, my second with a 
 wheelwright, and my third with the family of a poor 
 miller; but I always had a bed to myself and clean 
 sheets (though coarse). A sleepy traveller needs no 
 more.* 
 
 We are afloat at last on the little river, which loses its 
 terrors in broad daylight. I am in the paper canoe, and 
 Tom is swimming behind. If that is the way he intends 
 to follow me during the whole voyage he will incur much 
 useless fatigue. Why does not Tom simply run along 
 the bank? he would go twice as fast, with a tenth of the 
 fatigue. I stop the canoe and reason with poor Tom. I 
 explain all this to him both verbally and by signs, but 
 his only answer is to look at me imploringly, and lift up 
 his wet old nose, and splash with his fore-paws, and put 
 one of them timidly on the edge of the canoe. I remove 
 the paw, and use one word of menace : the sensitive 
 
 * I much prefer the independence of a tent, but in this voyage it 
 did not seem practicable to carry a tent and provisions.
 
 j V
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 1 1 
 
 creature takes an expression of extreme sadness ; I have 
 wounded his feelings. I speak more kindly, and explain 
 that the only objection is to his bigness ; that he is dearly 
 beloved, but unhappily too big ; and that the canoe can 
 never carry both of us. The kind tones encourage him 
 again ; this time he puts both paws on the canoe, and is 
 within a hairbreadth of upsetting her. My only chance 
 of getting the great, heavy, clinging paws off, is to hit 
 their owner a smart rap on the nose with the paddle. 
 
 The narrow stream winds rapidly between banks of 
 gravel, and four little boys are running along the shore, 
 keeping pace with the swift canoe. Poor Tom cannot 
 swim quite so fast, and has been left behind for several 
 turns of the river, but now he comes galloping like a 
 racehorse across the fields. Nothing could be easier and 
 more agreeable than the voyage has hitherto been, but 
 the stream, already very rapid, runs faster and faster, 
 and is evidently carrying me into a dense grove of trees, 
 which will probably be long, and which may offer very 
 serious difficulties. The worst of these very narrow riv- 
 ers is that there is not room to use the paddle, and you 
 are carried along by the impetuous current with a very 
 slight chance either of stopping yourself, if rushing 
 upon obvious peril, or of defending yourself against the 
 branches. 
 
 Here we are amongst the willows, carried rapidly 
 down a little sylvan tunnel, three or four feet wide and 
 about a yard high. It is wonderfully beautiful, if one 
 had only the time to appreciate its beauty ; but the cur- 
 rent is so strong and impetuous, and the turns are so 
 numerous, that there is hardly time to think of anything 
 but the management of the canoe. The little boys are 
 behind somewhere, I hear their loud chatter in the dis-
 
 12 The Unknown River. 
 
 tance, and a yelping bark from Tom informs me that he 
 is yet alive, though I know not whether in water or on 
 land. 
 
 The first insurmountable obstacle is a young tree, lying 
 quite across the stream. It has not been cut down, but 
 the water has eaten away the earth about its roots, and it 
 has fallen across the current. If the place had been a 
 little more open I might have hauled the canoe on shore 
 and launched her a little lower down, but here the dense 
 underwood makes that manoeuvre impossible. Here 
 come the little boys ! I have a long and strong cord in 
 the canoe ; I tie a stone to one end of it, and throw it 
 over a branch to a boy on the other side, telling him to 
 tie it to the top of the fallen tree. Then, with the branch 
 for a fulcrum, I and the little boys on my side pull very 
 hard, and gradually the little tree rises and rises till the 
 course is clear. After overcoming other difficulties with 
 the help of the little boys, who were exceedingly useful, 
 I came to a place where the river was less impetuous, 
 and where I had leisure to admire its beauty. The 
 canoe was floating pleasantly through a rich wood of 
 oak and chestnut with here and there a group of graceful 
 poplars. It was a constant succession of scenes like the 
 one given opposite, whose exquisite loveliness it is not 
 easy to convey by Art.
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 13 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE etching which illustrated the end of our last 
 chapter was done on the copper from jiature at 
 a little place that seemed convenient for lunch. A few 
 square yards of firm sand-bank lay between the dense 
 underwood and a deep pool, and this sand-bank was 
 covered with short grass. The canoe was drawn up 
 here, and her owner took out the materials for luncheon, 
 and made what would have been a solitary meal, if Tom 
 had not come up in great glee, doubly delighted at find- 
 ing his master on terra Jirma, and all the signs of a 
 festival spread out around him. Tom loves his master 
 dearly, but his affection for beef and mutton is at least 
 equally strong, and it is probable that the happiest hours 
 of Tom's existence are such hours as this, when, in addi- 
 tion to the excitement of travel, and the free expenditure 
 of his immense energy, he has the satisfaction of dining 
 with his master on terms of something like equality. 
 All the little boys had now been left behind except one, 
 and he, unfortunately for his own interest, was on the 
 other side of the stream. I wanted to get him over 
 and invite him to lunch, and crossed for the purpose in 
 the canoe ; but the canoe only held one person, and the 
 youth did not sit steadily, so that before we were two 
 yards from the shore a capsize seemed inevitable, and I 
 put back. After luncheon the voyage was resumed ; 
 the nature of it will be best gathered from the etching.
 
 14 The Unknown River. 
 
 There are two little villages in the region where I 
 was now voyaging, about a mile apart, and bearing the 
 same name of Voudenay, so, to know one from the 
 other, the inhabitants have called them Voudenay-l'Eglise 
 and Voudenay-le-Chateau. My first day's "voyage was 
 from one of these villages to the other, total distance one 
 mile. The reader may laugh if he likes, but that is 
 about the proper degree of speed for an artist on his 
 travels. 
 
 After dark, as I wished to get a few miles lower down 
 the stream, I determined, as the moon did not rise till 
 rather late, to continue the voyage by lamp-light. The 
 canoe was provided with a carriage-lamp for the purpose, 
 which was fixed in the forepart of the deck, and it was 
 found quite possible to pursue a very intricate and some- 
 times even perilous navigation by the help of this artifi- 
 cial light. Where the narrow river was most thickly 
 shaded on both sides by dense vegetation, the branches 
 meeting immediately overhead, and festooned with over- 
 hanging creepers, the lamp-light gave a strange beauty 
 to the scene ; and as the canoe floated somewhat rapidly 
 down this little green corridor, it seemed like a voyage 
 in fairyland. Every tiny leaf and spray, every slender 
 thread of stalk, came for one moment out of the black- 
 ness of night into the full brilliance of the lamp-light, 
 then passed into the darkness behind. An endless suc- 
 cession of this inexhaustible loveliness made the night 
 voyage one continual enchantment, and I was not sorry 
 to have seen a river under an aspect so strikingly new. 
 There exists, unfortunately, an especial difficulty in ren- 
 dering the peculiar beauty of these effects in etching, 
 and, knowing this, I have not wasted time in the attempt. 
 The art of etching cannot reserve white lines of sufficient
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 15 
 
 thinness and purity to give the effect of lamp-light on 
 delicate sprays and grasses. The effect would be broadly 
 given, and it would be possible enough to reserve white 
 lines,* but not with the fineness necessary to do full jus- 
 tice to the kind of delicacy which, in subjects such as 
 these, would become the particular aim of the artist. 
 Nothing struck me so much, in this delightful little voy- 
 age with the lamp, as the exquisite tenuity of the smaller 
 plants as they came out with tiny leaves and stems 
 against the black void of night. This might be approxi- 
 mately interpreted in wood-engraving, which most natu- 
 rally works in white lines, but not so well in other 
 processes. It was found that this voyaging by night 
 added considerably to the interest of the exploration, for 
 the mystery of the unknown was still more strongly felt 
 when all that lay before us was in absolute darkness, 
 and only became suddenly illuminated as the lamp ap- 
 proached. 
 
 He who attempts the exploration of a river not reputed 
 navigable, must be prepared for passages of such extreme 
 difficulty that it may be necessary to remove his canoe 
 altogether from the water, and drag her over the dry 
 land. The morning after the voyage by lamp-light I had 
 a good deal of such work, so much that at length I lost 
 patience and hired a spring-cart in which both the vessel 
 and her owner were transported by a fast-trotting horse 
 to a place four kilometres lower down, whilst Tom gal- 
 loped along the road with a sense of freedom much 
 greater than any which he had enjoyed amongst the 
 tangled vegetation of the river's bank. 
 
 * For example, in the first plate in this series ('Unknown River,' 
 Chap. I.), some thin stems were reserved by an application of stop- 
 ping-out varnish.
 
 1 6 The Unknown River. 
 
 When the boat was launched again, the stream took 
 quite a new character. Instead of flowing with a cur- 
 rent of equal breadth, and almost equal rapidity, it now 
 alternately slept in calm pools and rushed hurriedly over 
 short pebbly shallows. It is difficult, in words, to convey 
 any idea of the variety of these beautiful pools, except 
 by simply saying that they are various. If there were 
 eighty of them, or a hundred of them, or however many 
 there may have been, there were just as many new and 
 admirable pictures. The shallows, too (though in passing 
 rapidly over them we had not time to think of much but 
 the safety of the canoe), were by no means the least 
 interesting portions of the voyage, especially when they 
 turned mysterious corners, and opened out new glimpses 
 down the stream. At length we came to a pool so very 
 long and so very tranquil that it seemed as if it would 
 never end. The canoe glided over its glassy surface for 
 many a long minute, and just as the explorer rested on 
 his paddle and the little vessel had gone forward alone 
 so long that the impetus was dying gradually away, 
 something unwonted was reflected in the smooth water, 
 and instead of the accustomed intricacy of boughs and 
 fluttering of innumerable leaves, the voyager saw great 
 stones as of a feudal castle, and surely on the green 
 shore there stood a great ruin ! 
 
 Whoever wishes to enjoy the sight of some noble ruin 
 should come upon it in this unpremeditated way. One 
 half the delight of it is in the surprise. When you have 
 been told at starting by a guide-book, that ' at three 
 miles from your inn is such a castle, now ruinous but 
 formerly belonging to the Counts of, &c.,' and read the 
 description of it in detail, you will either be quietly 
 pleased or provokingly disappointed, but you will never
 
 1 8 The Unknown River. 
 
 remained. Soon, however, the stream narrowed again, 
 and an impetuous current rushed under closely woven 
 boughs, and between many awkward snags. Many a 
 place seemed impassable, but the stream was too swift 
 and too narrow to admit of any going back, and there 
 was nothing for it but to shut one's eyes and dash at 
 the branches with the paddle lying useless on the deck. 
 Once the boat was jammed between a root and a tree 
 where the stream was strongest, but I got through by 
 pulling at the tree with both hands. As for landing, it 
 was out of the question; there was no land to be seen, 
 nothing but branches, branches everywhere, overhead, 
 before, behind, to the right and to the left, with an im- 
 petuous current under them, strong, swift, and deep. 
 Then I heard a roar of water amongst rocks, and in an 
 instant, turning a corner, found myself at the foot of a 
 steep hill, thickly wooded as far as I could see ; and 
 where the water had eaten into the hill the rocks were 
 bare, a long row of them, and there were stones in the 
 stream, over which it boiled with white foam. However, 
 there was paddle-room, and I was really far safer than 
 five minutes before under the branches. Whilst happily 
 congratulating myself on my escape from so many diffi- 
 culties, I turned a sharp corner; a long branch lay 
 athwart the stream from side to side, two feet above the 
 water ; the boat passed under it, but I could not diminish 
 myself sufficiently to pass under it too, so was upset in 
 an instant, and fell in head first.
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 19 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE shipwreck that ended the last chapter occurred 
 just at sunset. After a night's rest in a poor cot- 
 tage, the voyage was resumed in the brilliant light of a 
 new and cloudless day. 
 
 The river was still most dangerous, slipping furtively 
 and fast through the thickest underwood, turning sharply 
 in unforeseen ways and places, like a panther in the 
 dense jungle. 
 
 At last, after being hurried down a narrow channel, 
 with about as much freedom of will as the train in an 
 atmospheric tube, we came suddenly out upon a great 
 open pool. This was the confluence of the Arroux and 
 the Dree, and the Arroux had doubled his substance 
 by this alliance. 
 
 Before it, he had been a wild young rivulet of the 
 most imprudent and impetuous character ; after it, he had 
 times of leisure, and lived in visible dignity, an impor- 
 tant occupier of land. Imagine a constant succession 
 of large and beautiful pools linked together by rapid 
 babbling shallows on which the canoe darted gaily and 
 swiftly without grounding. The pools were deep, with 
 sloping bottoms of the finest sand, perfect bathing-places 
 every one, and every one a picture. 
 
 After many windings, one curve of the beautiful river 
 disclosed a noble city, rising far off on the slope of a 
 lofty hill, blue in the haze of the bright afternoon, with
 
 2o The Unknown River. 
 
 massive walls and many towers. It is old Augusto- 
 dunum, once the sister of Rome and her rival, since then 
 strong in the middle ages with all the picturesque strength 
 of turret and battlement, now narrowed till -within the 
 vast enclosure of the Roman fortifications the market- 
 gardener grows his vegetables, and the farmer ploughs 
 his fields. Still by the quiet river the Roman wall stands 
 rugged, rich branches hanging over it, heavy and full, 
 and striving to reach the flowing water. And the Roman 
 gate still augustly receives the traveller as he crosses the 
 bridge over the Arroux, its gray arches and pilasters 
 borne high over the mighty portals with a little statue 
 of the Virgin between them, record of the faith of the 
 middle ages, and a gas-lamp to prove that the modern 
 time has come. 
 
 A great and wonderful Roman city, one of the noblest 
 in the Roman world, stood here on the banks of the 
 Arroux. In the circuit of her walls were more than two 
 hundred towers. She had a great amphitheatre, and 
 innumerable temples, and theatres, and baths. The soil 
 to this day is full of fragments of precious marbles from 
 the luxurious Roman dwellings. For a thousand years 
 the earth has been yielding a harvest of antiquities, still 
 inexhaustible ; columns, and statues, and bronzes, and 
 pavements of Roman mosaic. And when the glorious 
 Roman city, SOROR ET AEMULA ROMAE, was utterly 
 ravaged and destroyed, there arose upon her site a 
 mediaeval city, smaller, yet not less beautiful, so that a 
 king of France called it his ' City of Beautiful Towers.' 
 But the mediaeval city has disappeared almost as com- 
 pletely as the Roman. The classic amphitheatre is razed 
 to the ground ; of the mediaeval cathedral (a great edi- 
 fice of the purest Gothic) there remains one arch in a
 
 An Etchers Voyage of Discovery. 2 1 
 
 garden. The present cathedral is a church which stood 
 under the shadow of the old one. A few fragments of 
 the mediaeval city remain here and there, the house of 
 Rolin, chancellor of Burgundy, now a carpenter's shop, 
 a tower of the old Donjon, and here and there a few 
 houses of the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Still 
 Autun is a picturesque and quaint place, full of endless 
 subjects for an etcher. 
 
 If there is any thing in the history of the past that can 
 move or interest the present, the past of this strange city 
 cannot leave us cold. Who could float here on the 
 Arroux, close to the Roman wall, without thinking of all 
 that has happened here, by the shore of this now peace- 
 ful river? A simple catalogue of the vicissitudes of this 
 city, unparalleled in the succession of her misfortunes, 
 reads like some marvellous poem. The story of all her 
 sieges has a Homeric grandeur. 
 
 First she was ravaged by Tetricus. After a resistance 
 of seven months she was punished by the conqueror of 
 Tetricus, Aurelian. Ruined by German hordes in the 
 third century, she was sacked again under Diocletian. 
 For twenty-five years she lay prostrate in her ashes, and 
 the lands about her were untilled. She was punished 
 again by Constantius after the defeat of Magnentius. 
 She was besieged by Chonodomarus and Vestralphus ; 
 and after that by the Vandals ; and after that by the Bur- 
 gundians ; and then by Attila, who massacred the inhabi- 
 tants and reduced the whole place to ashes. Childebert 
 and Clotaire ruined the city on the flight of Godmar. 
 The Saracens sacked Autun ; the Normans sacked it in 
 886, and a few years later Rollo pillaged it again. After 
 the battle of Poictiers the English came and burnt part 
 of the city. Admiral Coligny came and burnt a priory
 
 22 The Unknown River. 
 
 and the palace of an abbot, pillaging the abbey. 
 Towards the end of the sixteenth century Autun was 
 besieged by the Marshal Daumont, and her archives 
 used for gun-wadding. 
 
 There are great incidents in her history : the martyr- 
 dom of St. Symphorien, the visit of Bishop Proculus to 
 Attila. The reader may remember the great picture by 
 Ingres, of the young Symphorien led by the Roman 
 lictors to execution, his mother encouraging him from 
 the wall. And if Symphorien sacrificed himself for his 
 faith, Proculus did the same for his fellow-citizens. He 
 went to Attila's camp to entreat him to spare the city, and 
 Attila beheaded him. 
 
 A memorable circumstance, in another way, was the 
 visit of Constantine to Autun. Constantine had raised 
 the city from ruin and despair ; rebuilt her edifices, re- 
 established her schools. Finally he came in person with 
 his court. The expression of the people's gratitude 
 moved him to tears. He forgave them five whole years 
 of taxes. 
 
 The saddest history connected with the city is that of 
 poor Queen Brunehault, early in the seventh century. 
 She wished to place her grandson (she had four) on the 
 throne of her son Tyherri, who was dead. Clotaire II. 
 had the four sons arrested. The queen herself was 
 arrested near the lake of Yverdun, and taken to Clo- 
 taire's camp in Burgundy. Three days of torture ended 
 by a derisive promenade on a camel through the camp. 
 Her grandsons were slaughtered before her eyes ; then 
 she herself was tied to the tail of a wild horse. Her 
 body was brought to Autun and laid in a marble tomb. 
 
 But the grandest and noblest action of all that shed 
 lustre on the antique city, is the refusal of the Count de
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 23 
 
 Charni to execute the massacre of St. Bartholomew. 
 There were eight hundred Calvinists in the place, and 
 the order came to slay them ; but the advocate Jeannin 
 recommended the Bailly, de Charni, to disobey the 
 royal mandate, and they spared the Calvinists, to their 
 own eternal honor. In his disobedience De Charni 
 had the boldness to tell the king that he wished to leave 
 him time to reflect upon orders issued in anger ; and the 
 Chancellor, on reading De Charm's letter to his majesty, 
 observed, *Oestun juge de 'village qui nous -prtecrit 
 notre devoir!' 
 
 The bishops of Autun, when newly appointed, used 
 to make a solemn entry into their city. They had an 
 episcopal residence at Lucenay (an exquisitely beautiful 
 little place amongst the hills), and the new bishop left 
 this residence in state. But he did not enter Autun at 
 once. First he stopped at the monastery of St. Andoche, 
 without the walls, and the abbess was obliged to enter- 
 tain him and all his retinue. Near the convent there 
 was a country-house called Genetoie, and the proprietor 
 of it was obliged to give the bishop hot water for his 
 feet, an obligation much less heavy than that which fell 
 upon the abbess. The bishop went to Genetoie to await 
 the arrival of the chapter. When they came he pre- 
 sented himself at the closed door of the cloister, and was 
 refused admission twice, answering each time that he 
 was the bishop of Autun. The third time he was 
 admitted, and took the oath. 
 
 The accompanying illustration shows all that remain 
 of the house of Genetoie as it appeared when islanded 
 by the flood of 1866.
 
 24 The Unknown River. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE bishops made their entry into the city by the 
 bridge of St. Andoche, but one of them went out 
 of it again by the other bridge, and his carriage-wheels 
 rattled on the road to Paris, and in Paris he took up a 
 new trade which he practised with the most distinguished 
 success. Can you fancy Talleyrand as a bishop, going 
 about gravely in violet, and giving his precious benedic- 
 tion? All the portraits I ever saw of him represent him 
 in court dress, and nothing is more difficult than to rid 
 one's self, even temporarily, of an association. The con- 
 verse difficulty is that of imagining Pius IX. as an 
 officer of dragoons. Had it been possible to see the 
 two together, in the garb of their first professions, who 
 would have guessed which was to become a famous pope 
 and which an equally celebrated diplomatist? 
 
 When Autun was left behind, the river went for half 
 a mile in such a stately manner that anybody would 
 have given it credit for being navigable in the most 
 serious sense of the word, navigable for vessels laden 
 with much more valuable merchandise than the mate- 
 rials of an unpopular art. In this long, quiet reach the 
 lads from the college came to practise themselves in 
 swimming, and this led me to think about three youths 
 who may have bathed here not so very long ago, but 
 whose history was at least as romantic as that of the
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 25 
 
 Greek and Roman heroes they read about in their text- 
 books at the college. One of these youths was called 
 Neapoleonne de Bounaparte,* and the two others were 
 brothers of his. Napoleon did not remain quite four 
 months at the college of Autun (the fact is unknown to 
 all his biographers) , but his brother Joseph stayed here 
 as many years. Napoleon's little cell (the colleges had 
 cells in those da} 7 s) still existed two or three years since. 
 It was positively known to be one of the five or six that 
 remained, but which there was no means of ascertain- 
 ing. 
 
 At length the towers of Autun, which showed them- 
 selves in glimpses during the windings of the river, and 
 completed in this way a hundred pretty compositions, 
 disappeared finally behind a spur of hill clothed with a 
 dense pine-forest. Once more the canoe floated on a 
 quite lonely river without evidence of human labor or 
 habitation, except now and then the smoke of a distant 
 farm, or the cry of the drivers of oxen, generally the 
 name of each animal, sung out with a musical cadence. 
 It was pleasant to get into the perfect country again, 
 though Autun scarcely seems a city, and the Arroux 
 flows past it undisturbed by human interference, except 
 when the strong brown-skinned horsemen ride up to 
 their waists in the water, and the fishermen cast their 
 nets. 
 
 Westwards rose the blue mass of the Beuvray, where 
 recent investigations have fixed the site of a city older 
 than Augustodunum, the Bibracte of the Gauls. But 
 Bibracte is almost without a history. Caesar went there, 
 and said that it was a great stronghold, and took provi- 
 sions from it for his army, but left us scarcely a word of 
 
 * So entered on the college books.
 
 26 The Unknown River. 
 
 description. Bibracte can never have been more than 
 a great fortified hill-village, or Gaulish oppidum, com- 
 posed of very rude huts, huddled close together, and 
 protected by solid walls built in the strong Gaulish way, 
 with logs nailed together with huge nails, and earth and 
 stone between them. Floating down the river in the 
 evening I saw the last flames of sunset die behind the 
 Beuvray, and the majesty of its purple crests was en- 
 hanced by its ancient strength. What is on the hill- 
 crest now? On the site of the buried city is a forest of 
 old gnarled beeches, and in the midst of the forest stands 
 a little camp of huts, where an antiquary passes his sum- 
 mers, with a band of faithful men. Even now, I thought, 
 in the evening, he is standing on some brow of rock, 
 and looking over the boundless plains. He can see 
 the lands beyond the Loire, and the whole course of the 
 river that I am obscurely exploring. And when the 
 twilight comes, and his evening walk is over, he will go 
 to his wooden hut and sleep amidst his trophies. A 
 pleasant, enthusiastic, absorbed life he has of it up 
 there ! He tells me that there is danger in the delight 
 of it, the danger of a too complete abandonment to the 
 enjoyment of glorious nature and the dear antiquarian 
 dream. He has a charming house in the city, with its 
 salons filled with pictures and its museum with antiqui- 
 ties, and only a rough hut up there on the mountain ; 
 but every year as the summer comes he longs for the 
 little hut, and the free range of the wild forest, and 
 the fresh, high air, and the silence and the calm, and 
 the healthy days of toil, and the lonely evening walks 
 about the hill, and the vast, illimitable horizons. Who- 
 ever has once known this passion for wild nature, never, 
 whilst health lasts, can lose it. There comes upon him
 
 An Etchers Voyage of Discovery. 27 
 
 every year, first a vague uneasiness, then a craving and 
 longing for something, he knows not what, and then he 
 begins to dream at night of regions beautiful and wild. 
 The streets of the town, even the spacious country- 
 house, begin to feel like prisons, and he wants to get out 
 into the forest, or on the mountain, or float on flowing 
 rivers and tossing seas. 
 
 In consequence of having etched the little plate which 
 the reader has just seen, I had to paddle some miles 
 after sunset, and did not reach the next village until 
 darkness had fairly set in. The river, fortunately, pre- 
 sented few of those dangers which had been so frequent 
 in the earlier part of its course. There were a few 
 rapids here and there, but not dangerous rapids, and 
 now and then one of those disturbed places called ' re- 
 mous,' produced by sudden alterations in the form of the 
 river's bed, often at a considerable depth. On the whole, 
 however, the river was safer here than anywhere else on 
 its whole course until it reached the plain of the Loire, 
 and this will be readily understood after a few words on 
 the geology of the district. The basin of Autun is a 
 wide valley hollowed in the rock, formerly a lake-bed, 
 and afterwards filled to the brim with alluvial deposits. 
 It is through these deposits that the river cuts its serpen- 
 tine course, and so long as it has to do with nothing but 
 soft loam, and sand, and little rounded pebbles, the navi- 
 gation is safe and easy. But when we come to the thick 
 granite lip of the great basin, we shall find that the stream 
 suddenly takes a new character. It is a lowland river in 
 the basin of Autun, a highland stream for twenty miles 
 as it crosses the rocky edge of the basin, and after that a 
 lowland river again as it meanders through the plain of 
 the Loire. This accounts for my getting safely to the
 
 28 The Unknown River. 
 
 inn after dark ; a little lower down all night-travelling 
 was out of the question. 
 
 But at the inn there was not a bed to be had, so I went 
 to a country-house on the other side of the river, belong- 
 ing to a rich land-owner whom I did not know personally, 
 but who had an encouraging reputation for hospitality. 
 Going to beg a night's lodging at a private house where 
 you are unknown requires more assurance, I think, than 
 any thing I ever attempted. 
 
 The master of the mansion was absent. The butler 
 put his head out of a bedroom window and heard my 
 petition. The butler was a very decent fellow; he 
 dressed himself, and came downstairs, and kindly heard 
 all I had to say. For a moment I believed the difficulty 
 overcome, but unluckily the favorable impression which 
 I had succeeded in making on this man's mind availed 
 me nothing, for the supreme authority was the house- 
 keeper. She put her face out of a window, an ugly vis- 
 age whose thousand wrinkles were strongly illumined by 
 a candle in her skinny hand, and one glance assured me 
 that she would be inexorable. Nothing could be more 
 decided than her refusal. And they talk of the tender- 
 heartedness of women ! 
 
 How and where I passed that night shall be a mystery. 
 How do vagrants and vagabonds pass theirs? 
 
 This castle is the Castle of Chaseux, a picturesque 
 old ruin by the river-side, in a charming situation. The 
 effect is more picturesque in the etching than in the 
 reality, because he who only sees the drawing does not 
 realize the curiously small scale of the towers. They 
 are decidedly the tiniest towers I ever saw in any castle 
 of feudal times ; but they looked larger, no doubt, when 
 they had their pepper-box roofs. For the rest the place
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 29 
 
 is not without grandeur, and it has some literary interest 
 as an occasional residence of Madame de Se'vigne with 
 that cousin of hers, Roger de Rabutin, Count de Bussy, 
 commonly called Bussy Rabutin. How she could ever 
 forgive him his offences against decency, and his slan- 
 ders against herself, is one of the mysteries of the 
 womanly heart. I never had the curiosity to read any 
 thing of Bussy's except a few of his brevities. One does 
 not care to plunge into dirty water ; it is enough for me 
 that Bussy shocked Louis XIV. (not an eminent model 
 of virtue) to such a degree that the indignant monarch 
 first put him into the Bastile, and afterwards banished 
 him to his estates in Burgundy. Here, at Chaseux, he 
 spent part of his seventeen years of exile ; and it is one 
 of the most extraordinary instances of the irony of fate, 
 that the portrait of this wretched noble, who disgraced 
 his family and his age, actually now hangs in the little 
 village church where he heard mass, hangs over the 
 altar, and does duty as a saint. The dress and accesso- 
 ries have been repainted, to suit the present destination 
 of the work, but the worldly, seventeenth-century face 
 looks still out of its flowing wig, between the tall candles 
 on the altar. And the priest kneels, and the people bow, 
 and the incense rises before it !
 
 30 The Unknown River. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THIS etching is intended to represent one of those 
 effects of twilight on the river which are amongst 
 the charms of a lonely voyage. You see the great 
 masses of the magnificent trees, but you hardly see the 
 dark ground they stand upon, and it is not easy to tell 
 where the water ends and the land begins. For the full 
 enjoyment of such an hour as this, the scenery should be 
 previously unknown to you, that the sense of mystery 
 may be felt in its fullest intensity ; but, on the other hand, 
 there ought not to be any apprehension of danger. It is 
 after a day of peril and adventure that you most enjoy 
 the peace of the solemn gloaming, when the reaches of 
 the river sleep in their glassy calm, and the heron lifts 
 himself languidly on the breadth of his great gray 
 wings. 
 
 The heron is not mentioned by accident or put in for 
 the sake of a poetical effect. He was there. He passed 
 the canoe like a winged shadow, and then rose in the 
 calm, pure air. Just then came a great flock of rooks, 
 and as they were flying about four hundred feet above 
 me, the heron attained nearly the same altitude. The 
 impertinent rooks attacked the noble bird, (fit game for 
 peregrine falcons !) and they plagued him and insulted 
 him till he knew not what to make of it. But he pre- 
 sented his sharp long beak to his assailants, and after
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 31 
 
 teasing him for a quarter of an hour they left him to take 
 his lonely way in peace. 
 
 Danger a-head ! O captain ! hearest thou not the roar 
 of the rapid? 
 
 It was time to cease gazing up into the unfathomable 
 blue ; it was time to get a firm seat and grasp the paddle 
 well ! No more enjoyment of the poetry of the twilight, 
 only a wish for the ' light of common day,' wherein all 
 sweet illusions fade. 
 
 It was a great rapid amongst boulders, the largest of 
 which were as big as the room you are sitting in, dear 
 reader. They were scattered to the right and to the left, 
 and one or two ugly fellows apparently barred the way. 
 The channels were narrow and deep, and the water 
 hissed and twisted amongst them like serpents. A yel- 
 low glimmer from the evening sky shone on the swift 
 currents, and said, 'I show you all their complexity 
 select ! ' 
 
 After another rapid, apparently much less dangerous 
 than the first, and in reality (as often happens) much 
 more so, the author arrived at Etang, a little old village, 
 with two fine bridges and a railway station just built. 
 There were some good subjects for etching in this place, 
 especially the old houses near the river. 
 
 A relic of great interest for me (who have a peculiar 
 weakness for tents and encamping) is preserved at the 
 house of a rich man in the neighborhood of Etang. It is 
 a fragment of the famous pavilion of Charles the Bold, 
 which fell into the hands of the victorious Swiss, after 
 the battle of Granson. The faded glory of its magnifi- 
 cent embroidery recalled the costliest of all the countless 
 tents that ever trembled at the blast of trumpets, and 
 such is the power of great associations, that the last rag
 
 32 The Unknown River. 
 
 and remnant of a splendor which dazzled men's eyes 
 four hundred years ago gives poetry to the house where 
 it is preserved, and to the very landscape that lies 
 
 around it. 
 
 / 
 
 Etang possessed, at the time of my visit, the ugliest 
 church (and this is saying a great deal) ever erected in 
 the eighteenth century. Preparations were, however, 
 being made for rebuilding it in a better form, and as the 
 new church was to be rather larger than the old one 
 it was necessary to make new foundations in the sur- 
 rounding graveyard. This disturbed numbers of crosses 
 which marked the graves, and these crosses were thrown 
 all together into a corner. The graves themselves had 
 to be cut through, and as the workmen simply dug the 
 new foundation without troubling themselves about the 
 bodies, they often cut them in two, so that many a dead 
 man had his legs amputated or his head cut off in a 
 manner quite unforeseen by his friends and relatives 
 when they interred him near the old church wall. The 
 writer witnessed some incidents of this kind which were 
 not much to his taste, and when the new church stands 
 in the glory of its Gothic arches and groined vault, and 
 windows of brilliant stained glass, if ever he visits the 
 place again he will never be able to see the stately walls 
 of the fabric without thinking of the mutilated remains 
 on each side of their deep foundations. 
 
 Two fine hills are visible from Etang, not mountains, 
 but true hills of noble aspect with rocky heights and deep 
 ravines. One of these is the Beuvray, mentioned in the 
 preceding chapter as the probable site of Bibracte, and 
 exactly opposite to the Beuvray, on the other side of 
 the river, is the hill of Uchon, which may not have been 
 the site of a Gaulish place of strength, but which still
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 33 
 
 carries on its rocky height the tall fragment of a mediae- 
 val castle, once of considerable extent. I determined to 
 explore this hill in detail, and gave a whole day to it, 
 with two guides a village schoolmaster, who kindly 
 offered his services, and a fine boy who was one 
 of his best scholars. The first thing to be seen was a 
 rocking-stone, a natural curiosity of sufficiently frequent 
 occurrence to need little description here. This stone, 
 commonly called ' La Pierre qui croule,' or by abbrevia- 
 tion 'La pierre croule,' is nearly at the crest of the hill, in 
 a large wood. Without the help of my guide I could not 
 possibly have found it. As in the case of other rocking- 
 stones, many attempts to remove it from its pivot have 
 been made by stupid peasants, who have harnessed 
 oxen to it with ropes ; but the stone, which weighs nearly 
 thirty tons, has always resisted all such attempts to de- 
 prive it of its peculiar virtue and pre-eminence. When 
 set in motion, its movement is so regular and sure that it 
 cracks nuts without injuring the kernel ; and as the 
 schoolmaster was provided with nuts for the occasion, 
 and we had a boy with us willing to eat them, I had the 
 opportunity of verifying this. 
 
 The ' Pierre qui croule' is close to a deep ravine, and 
 near it, on the summit of the hill, were many magnifi- 
 cent groups of rocks. Wherever a plough could be 
 driven, even on the very summit, the land was cultivated, 
 and the cottages of the peasantry were scattered amongst 
 the rocks in the little fields. The hill has an industry 
 of its own, that of sabot-making, due to the neighbor- 
 hood of the forest. I and my companions called at a 
 cottage which was a workshop of sabotiers, and were 
 very kindly received. As I was very thirsty, I begged 
 the sabotiers to give me a drink of water, which one of
 
 34 The Unknown River. 
 
 them immediately did, in a perfectly clean but most 
 extraordinary cup a new sabot. I had some rum in a 
 flask, and offered a drink to all present, on which the 
 four workmen and three visitors provided themselves 
 with sabots, and having half filled them with water, 
 passed the flask to flavor it. A little incident occurred 
 then which amused and delighted me by its quaintness 
 and originality. It was proposed to trinquer, to klink,* 
 and the seven sabots were solemnly struck against 
 each other in token of good-fellowship. They were not 
 the most elegant of cups, and they did not ring very 
 musically when struck; but after drinking out of glasses 
 all one's life, it may be an agreeable novelty, for once, 
 to drink out of a wooden shoe.f 
 
 Uchon is the quaintest little hill-village that I ever met 
 with in my travels. Perched on the very highest and 
 steepest part of the hill, not safely on the summit, but 
 on the slope just below it, the village commands a 
 view of immense extent. There is not a place of equal 
 height for sixty miles before it, and the eye ranges to the 
 illimitable plain of the Loire. It is just the site for a 
 feudal castle, and accordingly we find the last remnant 
 of one, a tall fragment of wall, leaning, like the Tower 
 of Pisa, over the narrow road, with a fine Gothic fire- 
 
 * The old Shakespearian word. 
 
 t What added to the fun was that, in addition to the schoolmaster 
 and boy, a friend of mine accompanied me, who is a dignitary of 
 Autun (not mentioned in the text for that reason), and it was highly 
 comic to see his dignity condescend to such a drinking-vessel. Some 
 time afterwards, an old gentleman who had heard of this incident, but 
 did not know the name of my companion, told the story, with the 
 remark that ' no eccentricity could astonish one in an Englishman, but 
 the wonder was how Mr. Hamerton could find a Frenchman to share 
 his freaks.' ' That Frenchman,' replied the dignitary above mentioned, 
 who happened to be present, ' was myself.'
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 35 
 
 place high up its side where the floor once was, and 
 where the lady sat in her lofty chamber, and looked out 
 on the world below. The most curious thing at Uchon 
 is the church, which simply follows the slope of the 
 ground, the floor in the interior being as steep as the 
 hill-side on which the edifice is built. As the altar is at 
 the higher end, the effect produced is really fine, and 
 might be worth imitating artificially. 
 
 The walk was enlivened by a continual conversation 
 with the schoolmaster, who was even more intelligent 
 than his usually intelligent class. Amongst other inter- 
 esting things, he mentioned several words which, so far 
 as he had been able to ascertain, were peculiar to the 
 place. Two of these were especially interesting the 
 verb douler, to suffer (Lat. dolere), and the substantive 
 vialct) a foot-path (diminutive of via). 
 
 The writer, in his descent of the mountain, was in 
 that state of excitement peculiar to landscape-painters 
 when they find themselves in a place full of good mate- 
 rial for study. The foregrounds were excellent, espe- 
 cially the magnificent old trees, and the groups of oxen 
 and peasants in the steep little fields composed in a 
 charmingly accidental way. The worst of it was, that, 
 being anxious to resume my voyage, I had not time to 
 etch upon the mountain, and the next etching I did was 
 at noon on the following day, when I had landed in a 
 quiet place for lunch, and the canoe lay idly on the 
 water.
 
 3 6 The Unknown River. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE river now flowed through very majestic sylvan 
 scenery, equal in some places to the finest parts 
 of the Thames, and curiously destitute of every thing 
 that we in England are accustomed to consider especially 
 French in character. The banks were often rocky, and 
 the foregrounds rich in heather and fern, with immense 
 quantities of broom. Out of this rose gigantic oaks, that 
 would have done credit to any park in England. Here 
 is a sketch of the trunk of one which I found to be fifty 
 feet in circumference. 
 
 This noble tree was in every respect one of the most 
 perfectly and equally developed I ever met with. Suf- 
 ficiently isolated for its growth not to be in the least 
 interfered with, and yet at the same time not too much 
 exposed to any prevailing wind, its massive column rose 
 straight upwards, and its enormous branches (themselves 
 equal to considerable trees) spread equally in every 
 direction. I have only given the trunk here, because 
 tne attempt to represent the whole tree always failed to 
 give any notion of its vast dimensions. Its crown of 
 foliage, too perfect and too regular to be picturesque, 
 was like a sylvan world erected on a pedestal. At some 
 distance the tree did not strike one as being particularly 
 big, probably on account of its beautiful proportions, 
 and the not inconsiderable size of its neighbors ; but

 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 37 
 
 once under the shade of the great branches, the spectator 
 suddenly becomes aware of the weight and size of the 
 enormous limbs, and then makes deductions concerning 
 the strength of the trunk that can support them. The 
 impression is completed by making the tour of the trunk. 
 The whole tree is perfectly sound, and neither lightning 
 nor human hand has ever lopped off one branch. 
 
 An impression prevails in England that the French 
 are indifferent to sylvan beauty, probably because wood 
 is their principal fuel, and therefore an immense destruc- 
 tion of young trees takes place yearly in the forests, 
 whilst the peasants amputate the arms of the older ones. 
 They often, however, preserve fine timber for ornament 
 as we do, and I learned without surprise that the fine 
 oaks of which the giant just described was the chief and 
 king, enjoyed, in consequence of a decree of the owner 
 of the soil, absolute immunity from the axe. Many trees 
 in the same neighborhood, especially the old chestnuts, 
 must count their age by centuries, and the beeches that 
 crest the Beuvray, though not finely developed, owing 
 to the altitude of their situation, give every evidence of 
 antiquity. The park of Monjeu, an estate belonging to 
 the Talleyrand family, near Autun, is full of magnificent 
 timber even yet, though much was destroyed by the 
 imprudence of a man of business, who, in the owner's 
 absence, sold it to a contractor. The haste with which 
 this unfortunate contract was annulled, at a heavy loss, 
 so soon as M. de Talleyrand became aware of what 
 had been done, is a proof that he valued the timber 
 for something more than its mere salableness. But the 
 best evidence that the French are not indifferent to the 
 beauty of their trees is, that scarcely a single town, 
 however insignificant, is without its public avenues, in
 
 38 Tfie Unknown River. 
 
 which the trees are encouraged to attain their fullest 
 possible development. What English town, of equal 
 population, has any thing comparable to the magnificent 
 avenues that encircle Sens? 
 
 The navigation during this part of the voyage was 
 more agreeable to the traveller himself than likely to 
 prove interesting when narrated. Here and there the 
 rocky bed of the stream produced narrow passes of a 
 trifling degree of difficulty, and after them the river 
 widened into long and tranquil reaches, over which 
 drooped the heavy-leaved branches, dipping their ex- 
 tremities in the deep water that reflected them. At 
 length, when these were gilded by the refulgence of 
 sunset, the sound of a mill-wheel became audible in the 
 distance, and that pleasant rush of water that may indi- 
 cate either a rapid or a weir. Then a village church 
 came into sight, and finally a few roofs of picturesque 
 mossy thatch, which turned out to be the whole village. 
 
 The church was one of those simple old Romanesque 
 edifices which abound in this part of France. The 
 architects of to-day have broken with the Romanesque 
 tradition, and in order to get more imposing effects of 
 height and size, have adopted a very plain kind of 
 lancet-gothic. But for a little village church I think 
 nothing can be so well adapted as the Romanesque, 
 with its tiny apse and aisles, and its general air of snug- 
 ness, completion, and solidity on a most unpretendingly 
 small scale. A little Romanesque church never seems 
 to need any thing more ; but a very plain, tall, lanky, 
 modern, gothic church, with its invariable gawky tower 
 at the west end looks hungry and uncomfortable, as if 
 the architect had been pinched in his financial conditions, 
 which he very generally is, and at the same time obliged
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 39 
 
 to give as many square yards of wall as possible for the 
 money.* 
 
 The church of this little village of St. Nizier had been 
 closed at the Revolution and never opened since. The 
 inside was full of straw, and my canine companion rolled 
 his wet hide upon it in a manner which appeared to 
 indicate that he would consider it very eligible bedding 
 if we stayed all night there. Seeing no sign of any 
 thing like an inn amongst the half-dozen cottages which 
 constituted the whole burgh, I felt greatly inclined to 
 accept the dog's suggestion ; but although the church 
 was an ample and sufficiently comfortable bedroom, one 
 could not hope to find any dinner there, and I looked 
 about the small cottages if haply there might dwell 
 therein some man or woman skilled in the preparation 
 of food. Now a certain observant villager, seeing me 
 thus in quest of something which I had not found, came 
 with much courtesy and proffered me his services ; and 
 it turned out that this villager was in a position to be par- 
 ticularly useful to a traveller, for he was at the same time 
 innkeeper and mayor, a man capable at once of nour- 
 ishing the stranger, and casting over him the aegis of 
 political protection. He lived in a small cottage whose 
 worst defect, in my view, was that of being alarmingly 
 damp. It had been submerged in a great flood which 
 had happened a few weeks before, and the walls were 
 still full of moisture that oozed out from the plaster on 
 
 * One of these churches was erected lately in a certain commune, 
 and when the plans had been made I asked the priest what sort of 
 architecture had been determined upon ; but neither the priest, nor the 
 maire, nor any other notable of the place, could tell me, the fact being 
 that, though the plans had been presented for their august approval 
 and honored therewith, they did not know the difference between one 
 sort of architecture and another.
 
 40 The Unknown River. 
 
 every side. However, here I stayed two nights, and 
 contended against the damp by means of a blazing fire 
 and warm bedding. The place was rather amusing, for 
 the inn was at the same time the village shop, and my 
 bed was in the shop itself, so I had ample opportunities 
 for studying the inhabitants of the place. As all the 
 villagers went to bed about sunset they did not disturb 
 my privacy in the evening ; but they began their shop- 
 ping at such an uncommonly early hour in the morning 
 that it was rather a perplexing matter how and when to 
 go through the business of dressing. The most amusing 
 plan seemed to be to lie quietly in bed and watch them, 
 but this, though agreeable to a sluggardly mind, did not 
 especially advance my own projects. One thing struck 
 me very much, and that was the total absence of any 
 visible stock-in-trade, yet notwithstanding this apparent 
 deficiency every article in demand always came forth at 
 once. 
 
 The innkeeper was a man of some culture, and both 
 could and did read, which is more than can be said of 
 most French villagers of his class. I found books in 
 his house which interested me exceedingly, especially 
 'Charton's History of France,' which is carefully illus- 
 trated from authentic memorials of preceding centuries, 
 not with fancy compositions invented by some artist of 
 our own. My host was doing what he could to increase 
 the free library in the village, already considerable 
 enough to be a great treasury for a poor student. He 
 took me to see it, and I certainly had not expected to 
 find a library in a place where there was not a tiled roof, 
 nor even a priest. 
 
 Every one who has travelled (unless he be a down- 
 right gourmand) will probably have remarked, that it is
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 41 
 
 not the places where we have fared most luxuriously 
 which usually leave the most agreeable impression upon 
 the mind. At the fine places, we expect too much, I 
 think, and are almost always either disappointed or 
 within a very little of being so. I have heard a whole 
 carriage full of men do nothing but grumble and swear 
 as they drove home after a most extravagant Greenwich 
 feast, and I have seen the same men quite happy and 
 contented with a slice of beef and potatoes. In this 
 latter frame of mind, which expects nothing, and is 
 always satisfied with what fortune sends, did the present 
 writer stay his two nights at St. Nizier, and he left it 
 with a pleasing impression, as he walked down, paddle 
 in hand, towards the rocky shore, his canoe being borne 
 with great ceremony behind him by the mayor himself 
 and one of the most active and influential members of 
 the Common Council. Nevertheless, it may be ac- 
 knowledged that the beautiful scenery lower down the 
 river was not a whit the less attractive for the fact, that 
 a renowned French cook kept an hotel somewhere in 
 those more favored regions, an hotel where a man might 
 not only eat, but dine.
 
 42 The Unknown River. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 AFTER St. Nizier the river became even more pic- 
 turesque as it proceeded. Rushing swiftly and 
 merrily between willowy islets it carried the traveller 
 along with very little consideration for his private tastes 
 and preferences. The only possible exercise of choice 
 was at the moment of selecting the channel ; after that, 
 retreat was simply out of the question, and all that could 
 be done was to keep as clear of accident as might be. 
 A river voyage has been compared over and over again 
 to the course of human life, and no wonder, for the 
 simile holds good in the minutest details, especially in 
 such a voyage as this. How very important, for exam- 
 ple, and, at the same time, how very difficult, it is to 
 choose the right channel when several lie before you of 
 which you are about equally ignorant ! If you have 
 made a mistake, if you have chosen the wrong profession 
 or the wrong wife, then there is nothing for it but to try to 
 get along as safely and creditably as you can, and avoid 
 an upset if possible. If the mistake has been made it 
 cannot be unmade, but skill and courage may still often 
 save a man from its most disagreeable consequences. 
 There are lives which must be as easy as it would be to 
 paddle down the broad Loire with the ordnance map in 
 your pocket, which shows the safest way everywhere ; 
 but these existences lose in interest what they gain in
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 43 
 
 safety, and the most interesting life to live, like the best 
 river to explore, is one in which the course is not known 
 in detail beforehand, but constantly calls for the exercise 
 of skill and judgment, and is even to some degree 
 affected also by pure hazard. 
 
 The tiny hamlets on the shores of the river were often 
 very beautiful in their way, or, at least, very picturesque, 
 and quite unspoiled by any modern perfections, and reg- 
 ularities of brickwork or of roof. Many of the best of 
 these hamlets are of great antiquity. I know one where 
 the cottages have not received any important addition, 
 and have not been repaired in any other sense than that 
 of simply replacing parts as they decayed, for the last 
 four or five hundred years. And the life in them has 
 followed the same unswerving tradition. The language, 
 the religion, the customs of the inhabitants, remain 
 almost precisely what they were in the Middle Ages. 
 The oxen are yoked to the char as they were centuries 
 ago, the char itself is a precise copy of that used by 
 remote ancestors ; the ploughs and other implements of 
 agriculture are untouched by modern improvement. We 
 know little of the lives that are led in these out-of-the-way 
 cottages and hamlets, because it is so difficult for us to 
 get rid of London and Paris, of literature and science, 
 and modern thought and reflection ; so difficult to realize 
 what a life must be which neither London nor Paris influ- 
 ence in any perceptible way whatever, a life quite beyond 
 the range of literature, inaccessible even to the cheapest 
 of cheap newspapers, ignorant of every thing which 
 makes us men of the nineteenth century instead of the 
 fifteenth or the tenth. This simple patriarchal existence 
 will not, however, endure very much longer ; the light 
 of modernism is breaking in upon it already here and
 
 44 The Unknown River. 
 
 there, through chinks in its ancient walls. It is difficult 
 to find a place which is forty miles from a railway, and 
 the railway brings its influences with it. A youth leaves 
 the parental cottage for some distant place, and when he 
 comes back gives his parents some rude notions of geog- 
 raphy. The region through which flows ' the Unknown 
 River ' is so near to the Alps that their white crests may 
 be seen occasionally from the summits of these hills, yet 
 the peasants are not aware that the Alps exist. Once, 
 however, a young man went to work at Grenoble, and 
 he came back and told the people in his village that there 
 were high mountains on which the snow never melted, 
 even in the heats of summer. This is the way a little 
 knowledge comes to them ; it comes personally, by oral 
 communication, not by books. A soldier comes back 
 from Mexico, and tells them that Mexico is beyond the 
 sea. I was greatly astonished at the little hamlet, here 
 faithfully represented, to hear a man of saddened aspect 
 speak of Boston. 'What Boston?' I asked, wondering 
 how he should know of any Boston unless there were 
 such a place quite near to him in France. ' It is of Bos- 
 ton in the United States of America, that I am speaking, 
 sir,' answered the man of the sad countenance, astonish- 
 ing me more and more, for what French peasant knows 
 that the United States exist, or the Atlantic Ocean either? 
 So then he told me his tale, and as it is both a pretty 
 tale and a true one, I repeat it here for the reader. 
 
 It is simple and short enough. He and his wife were 
 very poor indeed, almost destitute, and so, though tliey 
 loved each other much, she went out as a nurse to Paris. 
 In Paris she entered the service of some rich Americans, 
 who, when they returned to their own country, offered 
 her terms so tempting that she crossed the Atlantic with
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 45 
 
 them. Year after year she sent her earnings to her hus- 
 band, and year after year he laid by the hard-won gold 
 until there was enough of it to buy the cottage he lived 
 in, and a little field or two, enough to keep them in inde- 
 pendence all their lives. He took me into the cottage, 
 and showed me his wife's portrait (blessings on photog- 
 raphy, that enables a poor man to have a portrait of the 
 absent or the dead !) and kissed it tenderly in my pres- 
 ence, and said how hard the long separation was, and 
 how he looked for her return. As he said this the tears 
 ran down his cheeks, and he showed me the bright good 
 walnut furniture in the cottage, and the fields by the river 
 side, and said that all this comfort was her doing, all this 
 wealth her winning. She had learned to write on pur- 
 pose that she might write to him, and month after month 
 her kindly letters came, cheering him under the long 
 trial of her absence. It was Tour years since she had 
 left the cottage, and for these four lonely years the father 
 had been like a widower, and the children had grown 
 around him. And now the months went ever more and 
 more slowly, as it seemed, when he wanted them to go 
 faster, for this very autumn she was to sail and come to 
 enjoy the peace she had created. May the ship that 
 brings her paddle prosperously across the wide Atlantic, 
 and the good woman find her way in safety to her own 
 cottage, and to the loyal heart that yearns and waits for 
 her so wearily ! 
 
 ' Fair stands her cottage in its place 
 
 Where yon broad water sweetly, slowly glides ; 
 It sees itself from thatch to base 
 Dream in the sliding tides.' 
 
 The character of the river became more and more 
 strikingly picturesque as it advanced towards the Loire.
 
 46 The Unknown River. 
 
 Promontories of rock jutted into the stream, which took 
 sharp curves under steep and richly wooded banks, and 
 went to sleep in out-of-the-way corners, where it made 
 wonderfully perfect and tranquil harbors for. the canoe. 
 Sometimes there would be a ruin on some height, which 
 though on a small scale, was not without grandeur, and 
 afterwards the rich meadows and woods descended to the 
 level of the water. Then came a long decline where the 
 water rushed over a thousand dangerous crests of rock, 
 and after that a pool so long and sleepy and quiet that it 
 seemed as if the river had finally made up its mind not 
 to flow any more, but to lie for ever in that place like a 
 fish-pond. However, when it did awake and start again, 
 it started with such freshness and energy that the inter- 
 val of rest had evidently done it good, and it went gam- 
 bolling amongst the rocks in a manner which, if not 
 absolutely alarming to the canoist (one never confesses 
 to feelings of serious alarm) did at least call for the best 
 exercise of his skill. 
 
 In this manner we came to one of the very loveliest 
 places I ever saw in the course of all my wanderings, a 
 place where a rich avenue came down to the water's 
 edge. I left the canoe and walked up between the 
 stately trees. When the long avenue came to an end I 
 found myself in a noble demesne with a little lake, and 
 an island in the middle of it. On that island once stood 
 a noble feudal castle, where royal guests have been enter- 
 tained, and the castle lasted, in all its strength, till the 
 last century, when a great fire gutted it from roof to 
 basement. It would have been a noble ruin, but the 
 Marquis, its proprietor, in sheer anger at the accident, 
 utterly effaced every vestige of the stronghold of his an- 
 cestors, so that literally not one stone remains upon
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 47 
 
 another. An exquisite old gateway, of the loveliest 
 Renaissance work, with sculpture as delicate as that of 
 Melrose, has been re-erected at a little distance by the 
 present owner, who inhabits a simple modern house. 
 He intends to build a new castle more worthy of his 
 ancient name ; but an ancestral mansion, once destroyed, 
 can never be replaced. Even an ancient avenue may 
 be replaced in time ; young trees will grow old, and they 
 succeed each other naturally in generations, but the real 
 feudal castle is one of those things that neither man nor 
 nature restores when once it is destroyed and lost. We 
 may build an imitation of it, but not the thing itself; the 
 spirit that created it has departed, never to return. 
 There was something terribly childish in the anger of 
 that old marquis ! The flames had destroyed the wood- 
 work ; and so, in a pet he finished what they could not 
 achieve, and levelled all his towers !
 
 48 The Unknown River. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A CERTAIN critic in the 'Athenaeum' has lately 
 accused the author of this little narrative * of 
 'intense egotism,' and not very long since somebody 
 complained that he talked too much about his dog. 
 Now, in the present chapter, if the story of the voyage 
 is to be faithfully narrated, there ought to be a thrilling 
 account of a perilous and extraordinary shipwreck, but 
 if the writer is neither to talk about himself, nor his dog, 
 nor any thing that is his, how is he to tell the tale? 
 The truth is, that if you listen to critics you will never 
 publish any thing. One critic dislikes the egotistic bits, 
 another hates all landscape descriptions, another cannot 
 endure any allusion to past history, another feels bored 
 by any thing resembling philosophical reflection, a fifth 
 scorns the repeater of an anecdote, and so on ; till, if 
 you try to please them all, simple abstinence from writ- 
 ing is the only thing possible for you. On the other 
 hand, if you eliminate one of these elements in order to 
 please one critic, the others immediately complain that 
 it is wanting. It is a fact that a very eminent publisher 
 complained to me a little while since that there was not 
 enough about myself in a MS. I sent him, and too much 
 about Julius Caesar and the Gaulish system of fortifica- 
 tion. Now it so happens that the present chapter might 
 
 * These chapters were first published in the Portfolio, an Artistic 
 Periodical.
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 49 
 
 be dedicated plausibly enough to Julius Caesar ; for he 
 crossed the Arroux at this very place in his chase after 
 the Swiss, and no doubt it would be more modest, and 
 more scholarly, to give a learned little dissertation on 
 that event than an account of my own shipwreck. The 
 only objection is, that most readers would skip the spec- 
 ulations about Caesar. 
 
 It was already rather late in the evening, and I was 
 sketching by the river-side at Laboulaye, and smoking 
 the pipe of consolation. The high-road passes not far 
 from the river at that place, and my dog-friend, hearing 
 the sound of wheels, went to see what sort of a carriage 
 was passing by. Soon after the carriage stopped, and 
 I heard the sort of bark which a dog gives when he 
 meets an old friend, a bark of joyous congratulation. 
 
 It was a fat doctor of my acquaintance, who was driv- 
 ing towards Toulon-sur-Arroux in the cool of the even- 
 ing. It is his nature to be sociable, and he is a hater of 
 solitude. He had recognized Tom at once, which is 
 easy on account of -the dog's uncommon size and beauty, 
 and so knew that I could not be far off. Then he ad- 
 mired the canoe. Would I take a passenger? He 
 would be delighted to go with me to Toulon if I would 
 give him a berth. Could he swim? Swim! not in 
 the least, but he would risk the adventure nevertheless. 
 Well, but then he would most likely be drowned. 
 He did not care if he were. 
 
 Solitude is very pleasant, but students of landscape 
 get rather too much of it perhaps, and at times one will 
 incur a risk for the pleasure of a genial companion. 
 So it was settled that the doctor should send his servant 
 on to Toulon with his carriage, and that we should see 
 how the canoe would behave with both of us. Amongst 
 
 4
 
 50 The Unknown River. 
 
 my stores I had a waistcoat containing india-rubber air- 
 bags, to be worn whilst descending particularly danger- 
 ous rapids ; so I made the doctor put this waistcoat on, 
 and inflated the air-bags, till he looked like a pouter 
 pigeon. All being ready, we got into our places very 
 steadily, sitting face, to face, and I took the paddle, mak- 
 ing my passenger promise to turn neither to the right 
 hand nor to the left. He quietly lit a cigar, and sat as 
 coolly as if he had been on a safe ship and a deep and 
 tranquil sea. 
 
 The river here was a series of rapids and deep pools, 
 where the swirling water was always trying to get you 
 under the steep walls of rock. It was necessary in 
 several places to cross a rapid to avoid being caught 
 between great boulders, and we had very near shaves 
 for it once or twice. The coolness of the doctor all this 
 time was admirable to behold. He smoked his cigar 
 quietly and sat with perfect equilibrium, so that I had no 
 trouble with him of any kind except for his weight, 
 which was considerable indeed. I praised his self-pos- 
 session, and he answered that he had perfect confidence 
 in my skill. I said I could not promise to get us through 
 such a succession of dangers without an accident. ' In 
 that case,' he replied, ' I am satisfied that you will do 
 what can be done, and am content to take the conse- 
 quences.' ' But if we capsize you may be drowned 
 in spite of the waistcoat the current is tremendous.' 
 ' I'm not afraid of death,' he answered, with unfeigned 
 courage. 
 
 He had hardly spoken the words, when, in attempting 
 to cross the rapid to avoid an ugly piece of polished 
 granite, about the shape and color of a whitened skull, 
 I found it could not be done without uncommon effort,
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 51 
 
 and broke the paddle in trying. Of course, after that, 
 the upset ,was inevitable. The doctor did not stir, but 
 smoked tranquilly still, not uttering a single word ; the 
 canoe was carried against the granite, broadside on. 
 She rose upon it a foot or two, then slipped to the right 
 a little, the stern dipped, the water clasped me round 
 the waist and filled the well, and she (slowly as it 
 seemed) capsized. Just as she went over, but not be- 
 fore, I saw the doctor throw away his cigar. Once in 
 the water, I found myself hurried along irresistibly, but 
 soon got my head clear, and hoped, by surface swim- 
 ming, to escape contusions on the knees. In this way I 
 got down the rapid quite safely, and was hurled at last 
 into a deep pool, where, after the first plunge, I felt 
 comparatively at ease. Finding it impossible to land on 
 the rocky side, I allowed myself to float into an eddy 
 and was quietly carried out of the central current into a 
 sort of tiny haven or bay, where I landed. 
 
 It then became .necessary to think about the doctor. 
 He was not far behind. Like myself, he had been car- 
 ried down the rapid, and was now bobbing about in the 
 great pool, thanks to the inflated waistcoat. But he had 
 not the slightest notion about directing himself, and had 
 got into a cercle victeux, in a whirlpool that turned him 
 round and round. Seeing that he would probably be 
 carried out of the pool into some other rapid, I thought 
 it time to set about saving him, and called out that he 
 was not to grasp me, but simply lay his hands on my 
 shoulders. When I approached him in the water (rather 
 cautiously at first) he behaved with the same coolness 
 he had displayed in the canoe. He laid a hand on each 
 shoulder so lightly that I hardly felt it, and I towed him 
 easily into port.
 
 52 The Unknown River. 
 
 He began by expressing polite regrets, but these were 
 interrupted by the arrival of the canoe, bottom upwards, 
 and many articles that had been in her. There was the 
 box of etchings, which I swam for first, and many an- 
 other thing. Luckily I secured the canteen, and the 
 doctor prescribed brandy for both of us. After that we 
 hauled the canoe under the copse, and left it. 
 
 After walking about half an hour through a dense 
 wood and over very rough and broken ground, we came 
 to the river again, where it spread itself into a little lake, 
 and at the lower end of the lake there was a weir and a 
 mill. We looked miserable creatures, both of us. We 
 had lost our hats, and the miller's wife took us for beg- 
 gars. But the doctor entered exactly as if the place 
 belonged to him, and declared that we must have a 
 change of raiment. Now, considering that we were 
 constructed by nature on totally opposite principles, 
 resembling each other as the Tower of London resem- 
 bles the Clock-tower at Westminster, it is obvious that 
 the miller's clothes could not fit both of us. When we 
 were dressed in this disguise, the doctor filled the miller's 
 suit to overflowing, and looked like an over-packed car- 
 pet-bag, whereas the present writer had the appearance 
 of a village school-boy who had suddenly outgrown his 
 habiliments. At first the miller's wife viewed us with 
 suspicion, but the doctor made himself so agreeable that 
 the cloud disappeared from her countenance, and the 
 light of it beamed upon us kindly. 
 
 By this time it was dark, and our hostess took clean, 
 coarse sheets out of her polished presses, and laid them 
 on two of the four beds that were in the room. But the 
 doctor wrote a few words on a slip of paper, and sent it 
 to Toulon by a little boy, and in a while his carriage
 
 ' 
 
 > a
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 53 
 
 came up to the mill with the boy in it, and under cover 
 of night we made our entry into the town, still in our 
 borrowed clothes. The worthy innkeeper was just go- 
 ing to bed when we arrived, but the active little marmi- 
 tons, in their white jackets and caps, set to work with 
 alacrity at their tiny charcoal fires and shining copper- 
 pans. And we sat down, in our queer costume, to the 
 best of suppers, with wonderful appetites and joyous 
 laughter. And so pleasantly ended our shipwreck ; but 
 it might have ended not so pleasantly as that. One 
 thing is certain, without the inflatable waistcoat the doc- 
 tor's patients would have benefited by his advice no 
 more. 
 
 As this chapter has been written from the beginning 
 in open defiance of criticism, I may as well sin to the 
 very end, and speak of the faithful hound that followed 
 me. He needed no inflatable waistcoat, but came danc- 
 ing down the rapids like a cork, and never left us. He 
 is the most indefatigable of swimmers ; mile after mile 
 did he follow the canoe, like some tame, affectionate 
 seal. And is he not to be mentioned, he, the un- 
 wearied follower, the brave defender, the faithful com- 
 panion and friend? No one dare approach the canoe 
 when he is there ; and shall he not sup with us after our 
 shipwreck, and be honorably mentioned here? 
 
 Ce gu'tly a de meilleur dans I'homme, c'est le chien.
 
 54 The Unknown River. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THIS little etching gives a tolerably good notion of 
 the present condition of those fortifications which, 
 in the middle ages, were the citadel of Toulon-sur-Ar- 
 roux. The etching was made some time since ; had it 
 been executed during the last few weeks, I should have 
 run considerable risk of being ill-used as a Prussian spy. 
 For it is not safe, in this month of September, 1870, to 
 draw so much as the wicket-gate of a cottage garden any- 
 where in France, whether you are a Frenchman or a 
 foreigner ; and if the latter, your chances are so much 
 the worse. It had formed part of my plan to republish 
 this series of papers with additional etchings on a larger 
 scale, and I began these additional plates in the month 
 of July, intending to revisit the scenery of the whole 
 river, and select about a dozen of the finest subjects. I 
 had done a few of these when the great spy mania took 
 possession of all French minds, at least in the lower 
 classes, and there arose such a hubbub about my doings 
 over an extent of country thirty miles in diameter, that it 
 would have been absolute madness to let myself be seen 
 with any thing of the nature of drawing materials about 
 me. So the larger etchings were brought to an abrupt 
 termination. The reader, who is by this time familiar 
 with the slight and purely artistic little plates which have 
 illustrated these chapters, will be amused at the notion

 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 55 
 
 that they can be supposed to be of any imaginable utility 
 to Von Moltke and the Crown Prince in their brilliant 
 invasion of France ; but the peasantry in these parts have 
 made up their ingenious minds on the subject, and as to 
 arguing with them, one might as well try to argue with 
 a tribe of hostile savages. Like the country people in 
 England, they confound drawing with surveying, and 
 believe that artists are men employed to make maps. 
 Who employs them? that is the next question; and the 
 answer, of course, is, 'The King of Prussia.'* When I 
 made these little plates at Toulon, I was enjoying one of 
 the blessings and privileges of peace. He would be a 
 bold man to-day, who would sit down and draw a citadel 
 anywhere in France, even though it had been dismantled 
 for the last three hundred years. 
 
 Here, again, is the bridge. If any one drew that 
 bridge to-day, it would clearly be that the Prussians 
 might pass over it. But in those happy times of peace, 
 the peasants felt rather flattered that a ' map ' should be 
 made of their bridge, and the more knowing ones sug- 
 gested that, since the present writer made such good maps 
 of bridges, he would do well to make one of the new rail- 
 way-bridge at Etang, which was of iron, and perfectly 
 straight, and had been pushed from shore to shore all in 
 a single piece, just as you would put a plank over a 
 rivulet. 
 
 Toulon is a very quaint little town, with a rather pic- 
 turesque market-place on a hill-top, and the streets slop- 
 
 * In the good old times, before Bismarck was heard of, travailler pour 
 le roi de Prusse used to mean working without any probability of pay- 
 ment. In that sense, undoubtedly, the present writer, like most artists, 
 has worked a good deal for the King of Prussia. But tell it not in 
 Gath, repeat it not in the villages of Burgundy! a pleasantry of that 
 kind, in these times, might cost the jester's life.
 
 56 The Unknown River. 
 
 ing down on all sides to the river and the surrounding 
 country. On the top of the hill is the old citadel, of 
 which one tower serves for the tower of the old church. 
 The population of Toulon has diminished of .late years, 
 but the church, which used to be considered quite large 
 enough for the place (a quaint old Norman-looking 
 edifice), has not satisfied the ambition of the present 
 incumbent, who saw big churches rising in all the neigh- 
 boring villages, and thought he might as well have a big 
 church too. So he raised a subscription and built one, 
 but a certain pillar of it was unfortunately erected im- 
 mediately over an old well, and the covering of the well 
 gave way, and the pillar went down into it, as a steel 
 ramrod used to go down the barrel of a rifle before these 
 breech-loading times. 
 
 In lonely travel the great secret of avoiding ennui is 
 to take an interest in the people as well as the scenery. 
 Any one who is on the look-out for characters is always 
 sure to meet with them. For instance, I found a doctor 
 at Toulon who smoked without ceasing when he was 
 awake, except when he laid down his pipe to take his 
 knife and fork. He was an old man, in perfect health, 
 and still in full professional practice. This last fact may 
 seem incompatible with incessant smoking, and would, 
 no doubt, be so in London ; but in a tiny town where 
 everybody knew the doctor, he was indulged in his habit 
 by everybody. I spent a good many hours with him, 
 and during the whole time he was doing one of two 
 things, either smoking his pipe or filling it. He had 
 read most of our best authors in the original, having 
 taught himself English alone, with the help of nothing 
 but books. He had a capital little English library at 
 home, and had read every volume in it : all Scott, all
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 57 
 
 Dickens, all Shakespeare, Byron, and many others. 
 His pronunciation was, of course, as bad as our pronun- 
 ciation of Latin ; and I felt on hearing him read a little, 
 as an old Roman would feel if he could go to Oxford 
 and hear the men there deliver Latin orations. How- 
 ever, in this instance, there was nothing to laugh at, 
 because there was no pretension, and the doctor knew 
 our literature better than many Englishmen do, and 
 understood it, and loved it. He had never heard an 
 English word pronounced by a native before he hit upon 
 me, so that I was a real trouvaille; and he was extremely 
 kind to me, and invited me to breakfast, pointing out a 
 charming harbor for the canoe at the end of his garden,, 
 as a temptation to future voyages. 
 
 But the best character in Toulon was the matre of the 
 place, Monsieur B., an artist of reputation in a much 
 more useful line than any etcher. I fear that no plate 
 of mine will ever give Monsieur B. half as much pleas- 
 ure and satisfaction as the plats of his cooking gave to 
 me. He keeps the hotel where I stayed, and he made 
 me a little portable dejeuner to take with me every morn- 
 ing when I set out to work. French cookery is always 
 either exquisite or abominable, and his was of the former. 
 Monsieur B. is a very celebrated man indeed. People 
 write from a distance to order a dinner, and then travel 
 to Toulon to eat it. Unfortunately, he is also celebrated 
 as the most irascible man in the country ; which, consid- 
 ering the generally explosive character of French tem- 
 pers, is saying a good deal. As that man must be a 
 wonderfully perfect Sabbatarian who can win fame in 
 Scotland for his observance of the day of rest, so that 
 Frenchman must be irascible indeed who can make him- 
 self famous for his irritability. His powers of voluble
 
 58 The Unknown River. 
 
 invective surpassed all that I had ever heard in the way 
 of scolding, and their effect was immensely enhanced by 
 the most scientific modulation of tone. His loud voice 
 disturbed me in the early morning as he -scolded a 
 boy-cook for having used a pound of first-rate butter, 
 reserved especially for pastry, in cooking yesterday's 
 dinner. Now the misapplication of the butter was 
 commented upon in a restrained and subdued -piano, 
 with deep concentrated rage, and now it passed with a 
 rapid crescendo to forte and a terrible fortissimo, that 
 made the very windows rattle. When a servant is to 
 be reprimanded, the first observations are made in the 
 utmost moderation, and if only Monsieur B. could stop 
 there, he would deserve the credit of being a reasonable 
 though vigilant master ; but the sound of his own voice 
 exasperates him, and even when the culprit offers no 
 reply, his fault is described to him over and over again, 
 every time with increasing vehemence, till at length the 
 floodgates of invective are opened wide and the torrent 
 rolls and roars. 
 
 Yet nothing can exceed Monsieur B.'s politeness to his 
 guests. In the midst of his loudest furies, he will turn 
 aside and speak to you with a serene countenance and 
 gentle voice, whilst over the door of the dining-room is 
 the inscription : 
 
 ' Rien ne doit dtranger F honnete homme qui dine.'
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 59 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE admirers of beautiful scenery are often some- 
 what narrow, and even bigoted, in their admira- 
 tion. It has been the fashion, for the last half-century, 
 to enjoy mountain scenery very much, and to undertake 
 long journeys in search of it ; but the proof that this love 
 of nature is rather the love of a certain kind of exhilara- 
 tion, to be had best in mountainous districts, is that most 
 people still remain perfectly indifferent to the beauty of 
 the plains. They can understand that you have reason- 
 able motives for going to Switzerland or the Tyrol, but 
 what can you see to care for on the Loire ? ' Mere pop- 
 lars, you know, and that sort of thing,' say the few who 
 have visited the river that Turner loved. Therefore I 
 feel a little apprehensive that the sympathy of many 
 readers, which has gone with me whilst I had to speak 
 of rocks and rapids, and heathery hills purple in the 
 evening, may leave me now that I come to the broader 
 waters and less romantic landscapes of the plain. 
 
 And yet, when the last rapid had been passed, and 
 the river spread into sleepy reaches, only occasionally 
 interrupted by the gentle murmur of a safe and sandy 
 shallow, over which the canoe glided like a boat on 
 some languid stream ; when the sun at evening, instead 
 of suddenly and prematurely disappearing behind the 
 wooded heights, sank slowly in the immensity of the
 
 60 The Unknown River. 
 
 clear heaven, till he set on the far horizon as he sets on 
 the summer sea, there came upon the spirit of the voy- 
 ager such a sense of boundless space, and free breathing 
 of balmy illimitable air, as he never knew in the narrow 
 gorges where dark hills and dense woods overshadowed 
 him. 
 
 Every scene of nature has its own character, and its 
 own charm. The plains have not the sublimities of the 
 hills, nor the guarded seclusion of the shaded valleys, 
 and we miss the weird shapes of the gray rocks that 
 breast the stream where its flowing is strongest ; yet it is 
 glorious to see all the blue sky in the daytime, and all 
 the stars at night. And the river seems to gain a certain 
 dignity too, with its assurance of perfect peace. It has 
 space for all its waters, and knows restraint no more. 
 The graceful trees only adorn its borders, but do not 
 arrest its course. If it winds in beautiful curves, it does 
 so from deliberate preferences. It would be easy, as it 
 seems, to go straight to its distant bourn, but to go indi- 
 rectly is yet a little easier ; so it turns for its own pleas- 
 ure, and visits here a village, and there a solitary farm, 
 where the oxen stand knee-deep in the evening. 
 
 The gradual growth of a river might be illustrated by 
 drawings of its bridges. First you have the trunk of a 
 single tree, rudely flattened on the upper side by strokes 
 of a peasant's axe, and supported by two rude abutments 
 of unhewn granite blocks. A little lower down the 
 stream has become too wide for the single trunk to 
 cross it ; so now you have two trees that meet on a rock 
 in the middle. After that you come to the first serious 
 attempt at construction : a wooden bridge for foot-pas- 
 sengers only, the cattle and cart traffic still passing 
 through the water in a shallow ford a little below ; then
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 61 
 
 comes the first stone bridge, a single arch, if the people 
 are rich enough to afford a piece of accomplished engi- 
 neering, but, if the village masons have done the work, 
 more usually two or three tiny arches, that a stray cow 
 might possibly pass under, and which are pretty sure to 
 be choked with water in a flood which will wash over 
 the rude parapet. As the river widens it passes near 
 some town or city, and then we find the stately stone 
 bridge of careful masonry three arches, perhaps 
 where the high-road enters the town. After that the 
 number of arches increases, till at last you meet with 
 those long and stately constructions, whose fine perspec- 
 tive attracted Turner so much when he illustrated the 
 rivers of France. 
 
 The accompanying sketch, which represents the bridge 
 of Gueugnon, gives evidence that the Unknown River 
 has quite grown out of the romantic and tumultuous 
 period of its existence, and become a sober stream capa- 
 ble even of rendering service to navigation, if it were 
 worth while to deepen a few shallows here and there. 
 Indeed, from this bridge to the Loire the river is classed 
 amongst those which, if not positively navigable, might 
 easily be made so. 
 
 Gueugnon is rather an industrial place, as may be 
 guessed from the smoky chimneys in the etching, which 
 belong to some ironworks, where they make wire, and 
 sheet-iron for tinning. Here the traveller found an iron 
 canoe, flat-bottomed, and extremely even uncomfortably 
 narrow. She must have been terribly crank ; but that 
 is a defect the body accustoms itself to so easily that, 
 after a fortnight's practice, one sits in a crank boat as 
 easily as in a stiff one. There is usually a certain 
 amount of jealousy amongst boat-builders, and the me-
 
 62 The Unknown River. 
 
 chanic who had made the iron canoe spoke very dispar- 
 agingly of mine, which I took with British coolness, 
 merely inquiring whether he had ever descended the 
 rapids in his invention, which was entirely without a 
 deck, and would have certainly gone to the bottom like 
 a lump of lead after half a dozen waves had washed into 
 it. The crowd around us seemed to consider that the 
 best proof of the quality of my own vessel was her suc- 
 cessful voyage down the wildest parts of the river. 
 After that, the inimical mechanic became suddenly very 
 amiable, and conducted me over the ironworks, explain- 
 ing every process most politely. The reason for this 
 amiability became evident at last; for just as I left him, 
 and thanked him, he proposed to build me an iron canoe 
 which should be made exactly according to my own 
 fancy, and have a deck, and every thing I had a mind 
 to. In a word he was a shipbuilder (on a very small 
 scale) touting for orders. Had the present writer been 
 a permanent resident at Gueugnon, it would have been 
 rather a tempting proposal, as there is no employment 
 in the world more congenial to his feelings than super- 
 intending the construction of a boat. 
 
 There is a great weir at Gueugnon, which offers a 
 slope of most excellent masonry very like a great rail- 
 way embankment, and when the water flows over it, in 
 one smooth sheet, it would be delightful to glide down 
 it in a canoe. Unfortunately, however, there are rude 
 stones at the bottom, which would give the adventurer 
 a most unpleasant reception. I got amongst these stones 
 in the dark, and had plenty of trouble with them the 
 last inconvenience of that kind in the course of the 
 voyage. 
 
 There was a comfortable inn at Gueugnon well,
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 63 
 
 comfortable is perhaps hardly the word for any French 
 inn of that class, but these things go by comparison, and, 
 after lodging in peasants' cottages amongst the hills, it 
 seemed quite stately and luxurious to sit at dinner in the 
 evening with two candles in tall candle-sticks on the 
 table, and an attentive waiter at one's elbow. 
 
 The etching opposite shows the way in which I used 
 to have to seek for a lodging when belated, and it was 
 always disagreeable to me, mainly on account of the 
 necessary, yet almost impossible explanations. How 
 can you make a peasant understand your purposes in 
 an artistic excursion of any kind? How, especially, 
 can you make him understand such purposes when com- 
 plicated with the amusement of canoing? 
 
 On a fine night it was positively more agreeable to 
 sleep in the canoe, in the manner represented at the 
 close of the chapter. Since then the author has invented 
 much more luxurious arrangements ; * but it was not 
 unpleasant to make a bed of rushes, and sleep soundly 
 and softly, covered up to the chin with waterproofs to 
 guard one from the dews of the night. Many a poor 
 
 * This alludes to a contrivance by which a hut and a punt are united 
 in one construction. During the day, the punt, which is of wood, 
 contains a second punt of tinned 'iron. The iron punt is divided into 
 several compartments, in the largest of which sits the canoist. All 
 the other compartments are closed. Two of them are kept accessible 
 by movable lids ; one of these is used for provisions and the other for 
 clothing. That for provisions contains eight boxes fitted to each other 
 carefully, in which may be kept the different requisites for a week's 
 voyage, and a complete cooking apparatus. That for clothing con- 
 tains a change of dry clothes, a hammock, &c., and bedding. When 
 night comes the boat is drawn up on the shore, and the tin punt re- 
 moved from the interior of the wooden one. Two light frames are 
 then fixed upright in the wooden punt, and the tin one is easily lifted 
 upon these frames. A double curtain is then fixed all round, and we 
 have a hut with a wooden floor, a metallic roof, and canvas sides. In 
 this hut the hammock is easily suspended.
 
 64 The Unknown River. 
 
 soldier in the present war, forced to lie on the bare 
 ground, often stony and muddy, would consider these 
 contrivances a luxury. It was something, too, before 
 going to sleep, to look up at the moonlit clouds and the 
 stars in the depths between them. 
 
 This contrivance has been completely realized in every detail, but I 
 have never had an opportunity of using it, because, during the sum- 
 mer of 1870 there was no water in the rivers, and since the beginning 
 of the Prussian War it would be madness to show one's self in any such 
 mysterious-looking invention, as it would set all the peasants per- 
 fectly mad. In times of sanity and. peace it seems to me that nothing 
 could be better adapted for a tour such as that described in these 
 pages. It is unpleasant to have to leave work undone in order to go 
 five or six miles lower down a river to seek for a lodging. Many etch- 
 ings were left unfinished for that reason in the excursion^here narrated, 
 and have consequently been thrown aside. Many subjects remarkably 
 suited for etching had also to be passed without illustration when the 
 weather was not mild enough for a bivouac.
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 65 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 ON leaving Gueugnon, in the cool of a bright autumn 
 evening I saw a magnificent piece of black oak 
 which had been disengaged from the bed of the river 
 during the great inundation, and thrown upon the high 
 shore. The whole trunk was complete, and measured 
 seventy feet in length by forty in girth. I cut it in sev- 
 eral places with a penknife and found it as black as 
 ebony. How many centuries it had lain in the river's 
 bed I know not, but, judging from the color and condi- 
 tion of the wood, which was all black bog-oak of the 
 finest quality, the tree must have lain beneath the flowing 
 water as long as the black oak in the deepest bogs of 
 Ireland. What noble chambers might have been fur- 
 nished out of it ! what rich inlaying of parquets and 
 wainscot would it not have supplied ! 
 
 The landscape now began to wear an aspect of un- 
 common sadness and desolation. The river divided 
 itself into many straggling currents in a wide desert of 
 sand and pebbles. A low, yellow precipice of the same 
 material hid all the fields from my sight, as I sat low in 
 the canoe on the level of the dreary gray water. How 
 mournfully, too, the water seemed to murmur down its 
 tortuous, divided channels ! For miles and miles there 
 was nothing to be seen except a great chateau on the top 
 
 5
 
 66 The Unknown River. 
 
 of a bare slope, a long, ugly, melancholy building, 
 enough to make one miserable to look at it, and think 
 that any one could be condemned to live in it. 
 
 When I came near this chateau, the twilight was 
 already very far advanced, and I landed to eat a little 
 supper. The land was bare of trees, a desolate expanse 
 of uncultivated soil, where a herd grazed in the distance. 
 Suddenly I wondered not to see Tom galloping towards 
 me, as he generally had done at these improvised meal- 
 times on the shore. I called and whistled for him long 
 and loudly, but in vain, and during all that remained of 
 the voyage I saw his affectionate face no more. This 
 caused me some anxiety, and rather spoiled my pleasure, 
 but I trusted that he would find his way home again. 
 On my return I made inquiries, and found that he had 
 first returned to the inn at Gueugnon, after losing me in 
 the tortuous channels of the river, and stayed at the inn 
 till dejeuner the next morning. After his meal he sud- 
 denly disappeared, and the innkeeper could give no 
 further account of him. The same evening, however, 
 he arrived at my house, a distance of fifty kilometres, 
 where he rushed to his kennel at once, and fell down in 
 it like lead, exhausted. The next day he was all right 
 again. But it was a severe run, for no doubt he had 
 made the fifty kilometres a hundred, and followed the 
 river's brink in the thick underwood ; often, I dare say, 
 swimming against the stream. I never knew such a- 
 persistent swimmer. He never had the sense to follow 
 the canoe on the bank, but would always swim behind 
 it, however cold the water or long the distance. It was 
 this which had separated him from me. Being rather 
 pressed for time in the late evening, I had pushed on too 
 fast for Tom.
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 67 
 
 The voyage had been a lonely one from the beginning, 
 but it seemed doubly solitary after the loss of my com- 
 panion. I had never been able to do with him in the 
 canoe, he was much too large and heavy for that, 
 but every time I landed, either to make an etching or 
 eat a dinner and I never did either afloat Tom had 
 always joined me, and so the long solitude had been 
 made less difficult to endure. I humbly thank Divine 
 Providence for having invented dogs, and I regard that 
 man with wondering pity who can lead a dogless life. 
 
 The dreary hours and the dreary landscape both came 
 to an end at the same time. The moon rose, trees began 
 to reappear on the river's brink, the scattered currents 
 met together again, and there were vistas of prolonged 
 perspective. I remember one especially, a scene of 
 most perfect and extraordinary beauty. For a length of 
 about a thousand fathoms the stream was straight as a 
 cathedral aisle, and at about half the distance there was 
 a transept on each side, that might have been designed 
 by art. All along, the shores were shaded by the richest 
 foliage. Boughs hung gracefully till they dipped their 
 golden leaves in the glassy water. Tall poplars rose at 
 intervals, like towers, to mark the far perspective. It 
 was midnight. A pure semi-transparent mist filled the 
 still and silent air, and above in the clear heaven shone 
 the round and brilliant moon. Not a sound was to be 
 heard but the alternate dip of the paddle, which I used 
 as gently as might be, for it seemed wrong to break so 
 beautiful a mirror. At last I toiled no more, and the 
 little boat glided on and on with its own motion, as if 
 drawn by invisible spirits. During the whole voyage I 
 had found nothing so exquisite as this, nor has any other 
 impression fixed itself so perfectly in my memory.
 
 68 The Unknown River. 
 
 That scene was too ethereal to be etched, but next day 
 I drew this bridge, partly because it was the last bridge 
 on the Unknown River, and partly as a memorial of the 
 great and disastrous flood. In these terrible months of 
 1870, when a thousand bridges that spanned the fair 
 rivers of France, have been ruined to check the progress 
 of an invader more to be dreaded than any inundation, 
 men pray that the rains may fall and the waters rise till 
 the streams are all torrents and the plains all inland 
 seas. 
 
 After this bridge, the scenery of the shore began to 
 assume the large aspect that belongs to the stately Loire. 
 A steep bank rose in the distance, clothed with vines and 
 crowned with a group of buildings clustering round 
 convent-towers. The current became swifter, as if the 
 Unknown River were hastening to its end ; it curved 
 rapidly once, or twice, then suddenly behold an expanse 
 of broad water before me, flowing westwards, and before 
 I had time quite perfectly to realize the change, the 
 canoe was carried out upon the Loire. 
 
 And so the voyage came to a successful end, and for 
 the first time since first his waters flowed, the Unknown 
 River has been navigated. Shall I conclude with a 
 triumphant boast, and affirm that although Gaul and 
 Roman have dwelt upon its shores, and reddened it in 
 sanguinary conflict, its perfect exploration was reserved 
 for the audacity of an Englishman? Let me rather, 
 more modestly, rejoice in sharing that capacity for tak- 
 ing pleasure in the beauty of natural scenery which 
 belongs to so many in our own time. It is this, much 
 more than any particular satisfaction in the somewhat 
 monotonous business of paddling, which constitutes the 
 principal charm of all canoe voyages, and it is this,
 
 An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery. 69 
 
 more peculiarly and especially, which made privations 
 light to me, and labor pleasant, and time swift, during 
 the weeks I spent in, 'An Etcher's Voyage of Dis- 
 covery.'
 
 yo The Unknown River. 
 
 RESULTS. 
 
 A FEW words concerning the especial purpose of 
 this voyage etching from nature may pos- 
 sibly be of use to a few readers who may undertake 
 etching tours. 
 
 No art is more agreeable for direct work from nature 
 than etching is. The rapidity of it, and its freedom, are 
 greatly in its favor, and so is its remarkable indepen- 
 dence of damp and wet. Many of the plates in this 
 series were immersed in the river, after being etched, 
 when the artist was upset ; others were executed in bad 
 weather, with the rain literally pouring over the copper 
 in a manner which would have rendered any other kind 
 of drawing quite impossible. In the course of the ex- 
 cursion I did sixty plates, from which these are selected. 
 It is better, I think, to be rather prolific in production, 
 and select afterwards the plates which seem most suc- 
 cessful, than to spend much time in correcting bad plates 
 in the studio. My advice to etchers would be to spend 
 time rather in doing many plates than in polishing and 
 mending a few. This may be contrary to the feeling of 
 some painters, who rightly, in their art, obey the maxims 
 of Boileau ; but whatever 'value an etching may have 
 depends mainly on the inspiration of the moment. If it 
 were only possible to possess that inspiration always, the 
 art would be easier than it is. The only consolation I 
 have to suggest for the many failures and the disappoint- 
 ing uncertainty which ever attend it, is that it leads us to 
 work from nature, and look at nature, in the most essen- 
 tially artistic spirit. 
 
 THE END.
 
 Q 1 5 
 
 i ..