I hired a truck from a woman and hired a man to drag it, and so took the boat to the best hotel, a fine large house, where they at once recognized the canoe, and seemed to know all about it from report. The hotel porter delayed so long next morning to wheel the boat to the railway, that when we took her into the luggage office as usual and placed the boat on the counter with the trunks and band-boxes, the officials declined to put it in the train. This was the first time it had been refused on a railroad, and I used every kind of persuasion, but in vain, and this being the first application of the kind on French soil we felt that difficulties were ahead, if this precedent was to hold good. Subsequent experience showed that the French railways will not take a canoe as baggage; while the other seven or eight countries we had brought the boat through were all amenable to pressure on this point. We had desired to go by the railway only a few miles, but it would have enabled me to avoid about fifty locks on the canal and thus have saved two tedious days. As, however, they would not take the boat in a passenger train we carried her back to the canal, and I determined to face the locks boldly, and to regard them as an exercise of patience and of the flexor muscles, as it happens sometimes one's walk is only "a constitutional." The Superintendent of the Rhine and Rhone Canal was very civil, and endeavoured to give me the desirable information I required, but which he had not got, that is to say, the length, depth, and general character of the several rivers we proposed to navigate in connexion with streams less "canalizé," so I had to begin again as usual, without any knowledge of the way. With rather an ill-tempered "adieu" to Mulhouse, the Rob Roy set off again on its voyage. The water assumed quite a new aspect, now that one _must_ go by it, but it was not so much the water as the locks which were objectionable. For at each of these there is a certain form of operations to be gone through--all very trifling and without variety, yet requiring to be carefully performed, or you may have the boat injured, or a ducking for yourself.