I hurried towards the river, running obliquely to the south-east. If I could once win to clean water, I was prepared, in my desperation, to attempt to swim to the opposite bank. Stumbling, and sometimes wallowing, I made my way up a sludgy shore and suddenly came to a little creek or cove where a boat lay moored to a post. Close by, a wooden shanty, set in a small common garden with benches, like the Guinguettes of Paris, rattled to its very walls with boisterous disputation, while the shadows of men tossing wine-cups danced on its one window-blind. I unhitched the painter of the boat, pushed the prow from the bank, and, as the little craft swung out into the channel, scrambled softly on board and felt for the sculls in a panic. When I had once grasped and tilted these into the rowlocks, I breathed a great sigh of relief and pulled hurriedly round the stern of a swinging vessel into the cool-running waters of the Dordogne. It was not until I had made more than half the passage to the farther side that I would venture to pause a moment to assuage my cruel thirst. Then, resting on my oars, I dipped in my hat and drank again and again, until my whole system seemed to flow with moisture like a rush. At last, clapping my sopped hat on my head, I was preparing to resume my work, when I uttered a low exclamation of astonishment, and sat transfixed. For something moved in the stern-sheets of the boat; and immediately, putting aside a cloak under which it appeared he had lain asleep, a child sat up on the bottom boards. Now, my heart seemed to tilt like a top-heavy thing. Must this hateful necessity be mine, then--to silence, for my own safety, this baby of six or seven, this little comical _poupon_ with the round cropt head and ridiculous small shirt? He stared at me, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and suddenly began to whimper. “_Heu! heu!_” he cried in the cheeping voice of a duckling, “_la Grand’ Bête!_” He took me for the mythical monster of the peasants, whose power of assumption of any form is in ratio with the corrective ingenuity of nurses and mothers. “Yes,” I said, my brain leaping to an idea; “I am _la Grand’ Bête_, and if you make a noise I shall devour you.” His eyes were like full brown agates; his chin puckered to his lower lip; but he crushed his little fists against his chest to stay the coming outcry. My face relaxed as I looked at him. “_La Grand’ Bête_ is kind to the little ones that obey him. Can you use these sculls?” “_Mais, oui_,” he whispered, with a soft sob; “I am the pretty little waterman.” “Very well. Now, little waterman, I shall land at the bank over there, and then you can take the sculls and pull the boat across to the cove again. But you must be very silent and secret about having gone with _la Grand’ Bête_ over the river, or he will come to your bedside in the night and devour you.”