We put up at the Hôtel Labully, in the little square where the church stands. Satisfactory dinner. Later I took a twilight tramp along the high banks of a moist ditch called the Guires River. If it was my river I wouldn’t leave it outdoors nights, in this careless way, where any dog can come along and lap it up. It is a tributary of the Rhône when it is in better health. It became dark while we were on our way back, and then the bicyclers gave us many a sudden chill. They never furnished us an early warning, but delivered the paralyzing shock of their rubber-horn hoot right at our shoulder blades and then flashed spectrally by on their soundless wheels and floated into the depths of the darkness and vanished from sight before a body could collect his remark and get it out. Sometimes they get shot. This is right. I went to my room, No. 16. The floor was bare, which is the rule down the Rhône. Its planks were light colored, and had been smoothed by use rather than art; they had conspicuous black knots in them. The usual high and narrow bed was there, with the usual little marble-topped commode by the head of it and the usual strip of foot carpet alongside, where you climb in. The wall paper was dark--which is usual on the Continent; even in the northern regions of Germany, where the daylight in winter is of such poor quality that they don’t even tax it now. When I woke in the morning it was eight o’clock and raining hard, so I stayed in bed and had my breakfast and a ripe old Paris paper of last week brought up. It was a good breakfast--one often gets that; and a liberal one--one seldom gets that. There was a big bowl for the coffee instead of a stingy cup which has to be refilled just as you are getting interested in it; there was a quart of coffee in the pot instead of a scant half pint; instead of the usual hollow curl of brittle butter which evades you when you try to scoop it on to the knife and crumbles when you try to carve it, there was a solid cream-colored lump as big as a brick; there was abundance of hot milk, and there was also the usual ostensible cream of Europe. There _must_ be cream in Europe somewhere, but it is not in the cows; they have been examined. The rain continued to pour until noon, then the sun burst out and we were soon up and filing through the village. By the time we had tramped our mile and pushed out into the stream, the watches marked 1.10 and the day was brilliant and perfect. Over on the right were ruins of two castles, one of them of some size. We passed under a suspension bridge; alongside of it was an iron bridge of a later pattern. Near by was a little steamer lying at the bank with no signs of life about her--the first boat, except ferryboats, encountered since we had entered the Rhône. A lonely river, truly.