He took as much time to inspect as if she were a brig of 300 tons, and, when he came to look at the stern, I gravely pointed to a round hole cut in the partition for this very purpose! Into this hole he peered, while the crowd was hushed in silence, and as he saw nothing but darkness, extremely dark, for (nothing else was there), he solemnly pronounced the canoe "free," and she was duly borne to the hotel.
But Constance once had a man in it who was really "grand," John Huss, the noble martyr for the truth. In the Council Hall you see the veritable cell in which he was imprisoned some hundreds of years ago, and on a former visit I had seen, from the tower, through a telescope, the field where the faggots burned him, and from whence his great soul leaped up to heaven out of the blazing pile.
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; E'en them who kept thy truth so pure of old When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones."
Does not a thought or two on such great things make other common things look small?
True and good--but we may not stop always in the lake to ponder thus, for the current is moving again, so let us launch the Rob Roy on our old friend, the Rhine.
It is a change to cross a quiet lake after being hurried on a rapid stream like the Danube, and now it is another change to paddle from the lake into a wide river like the Rhine, which speeds fast and steady among lively scenes. The water is deep, and of a faint blue, but clear enough to show what is below. The pebbly bottom seems to roll towards you from underneath, and village churches appear to spin quietly round on the banks, for the land and its things seem to move, not the water, so glassy its surface steadily flowing.
Here are the fishers again, slowly paying out their fine-spun nets, and there is a target-hut built on four piles in the river.
The target itself is a great cube of wood, say six feet on each side. It is fired at from another hut perched also on post in the water, and a "marker" safely placed behind the great block of wood turns it round on a vertical pivot, and so patches up the bullet-hole, and indicates its position to those who have fired.