It was a dripping "Arethusa" that got into Origny Sainte-Benoîte that night, and but for the ready and resourceful "Cigarette" the adventure might have ended less happily. Although Origny is a dusty little village, as dull as any in all Picardy, the canoeists rested there a day, and had good profit of the people they met at the inn, as Stevenson's pages witness. The landlord was a shouting, noisy fellow, a red Republican. "'I'm a proletarian, you see.' Indeed, we saw it very well. God forbid that I should find him handling a gun in Paris streets! That will not be a good moment for the general public."
Hastily and unnecessarily "tidying herself" while being photographed at her door.]
[Illustration: THE BAZINS' INN AT LA FÈRE
"Little did the Bazins know how much they served us."--R. L. S.]
An accident to my bicycle in the neighbourhood of Origny made it necessary for me to go on to Moy by train, on a quaint little railway worked chiefly by women, who act as station-mistresses, ticket-clerks, restaurant-keepers, and guards of the level crossings. The carriages were filled chiefly with anglers, and every little station had a gang of them armed with a prodigious number of rods and lines, and each carrying a pail with a brass lid. I gathered that the pails were empty almost without exception, as sport had been extremely bad, though numerous patient creatures with rod and line were still to be seen in the drizzling rain along the river, which is here broken into many backwaters, lying in flat land among scraggy pine woods and good green meadows. One sturdy fellow who, like his companions, bore his ill-fortune with a smiling face, averred that though he'd fished all day and caught nothing, he had bagged fifteen _broche_ the previous day between one o'clock and half-past two, and between three and five he had caught an unbelievable number of trout. Anglers are the same in all lands, I suspect.
"Moy (pronounced Moy) was a pleasant little village, gathered round a château in a moat," as our author records. "The air was perfumed with hemp from neighbouring fields. At the 'Golden Sheep' we found excellent entertainment." I asked for the "Golden Sheep," and was directed to an establishment that was named the Hôtel de la Poste. I passed on and asked another villager, but he sent me back, as I found on following his instructions, to the same hotel. The postman put me right at length by explaining that the landlord had rechristened his house three months before in honour of the new post office across the way, a shoddy little building where I bought stamps from a middle-aged woman next morning. The landlady of the hotel, who might pass in every particular, save the myopia, for the "stout, plain, short-sighted, motherly body, with something not far short of a genius for cookery," described by R. L. S., agreed with me that her husband had made a sad mistake in dropping the old sign of the "Collier d'Or," "but he would have his own way, and there you are!" If I could have got the fellow--a fat, jolly mortal--to understand that to have the name of his hotel in a book by R. L. S. was an honour worth living up to, perhaps the old sign would have been fished out, regilded and placed in its old position. But he had not been the _patron_ thirty years ago, and he did not care a straw for anything so remote, though his wife had a gleam of pleasure when I quoted to her Stevenson's note: "Sweet was our rest in the 'Golden Sheep' at Moy."