Gun-barrels are the rage in Liege. Everybody there makes or carries or sells gun-barrels. Even women walk about with twenty stocked rifles on their backs, and each rifle, remember, weighs 10 lbs. They sell plenty of fruit in the market, and there are churches well worth a visit here, but gun-barrels, after all, are the prevailing idea of the place. However, it is not my purpose to describe the towns seen on this tour. I had seen Liege well, years before, and indeed almost every town mentioned in these pages. The charm then of the voyage was not in going to strange lands, but in seeing old places in a new way. Here at length the Earl of Aberdeen met me, according to our plans arranged long before. He had got a canoe built for the trip, but a foot longer and two inches narrower than the Rob Roy, and, moreover, made of fir instead of strong oak. It was sent from London to Liege, and the "combing" round the edge of the deck was broken in the journey, so we spent some hours at a cabinet-maker's, where it was neatly mended. Launching our boats unobserved on the river, we soon left Liege in the distance and braved the hot sun. The pleasant companionship of two travellers, each quite free in his own boat, was very enjoyable. Sometimes we sailed, then paddled a mile or two, or joined to help the boats over a weir, or towed them along while we walked on the bank for a change.[III.] [III.] Frequent trials afterwards convinced me that towing is only useful if you feel very cramped from sitting. And this constraint is felt less and less as you get accustomed to sit ten or twelve hours at a time. Experience enables you to make the seat perfectly comfortable, and on the better rivers you have so frequently to get out that any additional change is quite needless. Towing is slower progress than paddling, even when your arms are tired, though my canoe was so light to tow that for miles I have drawn it by my little finger on a canal. Each of us took whichever side of the river pleased him best, and we talked across long acres of water between, to the evident surprise of sedate people on the banks, who often could see only one of the strange elocutionists, the other being hidden by bushes or tall sedge. When talking thus aloud had amplified into somewhat uproarious singing, the chorus was far more energetic than harmonious, but then the Briton is at once the most timid and shy of mortal travellers, and the most _outré_ and singular when he chooses to be free. The midday beams on a river in August are sure to conquer your fresh energies at last, and so we had to pull up at a village for bread and wine.