I had been rowing gently as I talked, and now the nose of the skiff grounded easily under a low bank. I shipped the sculls, reached forward and took the rogue in my arms. “Oh! but _la Grand’ Bête_ loves the good children. Be a discreet little waterman, and thou shalt find a gold louis under thy pillow this very day month.” I kissed him, and, turning, caught at the knots of grass and hauled myself up the bank. It was a clumsy disembarkation for a god, perhaps, but my late comrade did not appear to be shaken in his faith. I stopped and looked back at him when I had run a few yards from the river. He was paddling vigorously away, with a professional air, and the moonlight was shattered on his scull-blades into a rain of diamonds. Suddenly a patrol-boat was pulled up the river across his bows, and I half turned to fly, my heart in my mouth. “Hullo, hullo, Jacksprat!” cried a rough voice. “What dost thou here at this hour?” “They were noisy in the _auberge_,” answered the childish treble, “and I could not sleep.” I went on my way with a smile. To have used the boat and cast it adrift would not have prospered me so well as did this accident. Yet I felt a shame of meanness to hear the little thing, taking its lying cue from me, lie to the men, and I wished I had not clinched my purchase of his silence with that promise of a louis-d’or. Pushing boldly across a wide moon-dappled margin of grass, so thronged with trees as to afford one good cover, I came out suddenly into a field-track running southwards, and along this I sped at a fast pace. But presently, seeing figures mounting towards me from the dip of a flying slope, I dived into a belt of corn that ran on my left between the track and the skirt of a dense wood, and lay close among the stalks waiting for the travellers to pass. This, however, to my chagrin, they did not; but, when they were come right over against me, they stopped, very disputative and voluble in a breathless manner, and lashed one another with knotty thongs of patriotism. “But who wants virtue or moderation in a Commonwealth?” “Dost not thou?” “I?--I want heads--a head for every cobblestone in the Rue St Jacques. I would walk on the brains of self-seekers. This Roland----” “He wore strings in his shoes to rebuke the vanity of the Veto----” “And to indulge his own. Head of a cabbage! thou wouldst weep over the orator though he condemned thy belly to starvation. What! shall I satisfy my hunger with a thesis on the beauty of self-denial, because, like a drum, it has a full sound!” “Be sure I do not defend him; but has he not practised what he taught?” “Of a certainty, and is double-damned thereby. For know that these austere moralists have found their opportunity to indulge a hobby--not to avenge a people. What do _we_ want with abstinence who have practised it all our lives? What do we want with interminable phrases on the sublimity of duty?” “But, thou wilt not understand that political economy----”