We started on the night of the sixteenth. A very cold night, without stars, lighted up only by a white sprinkling of hoar-frost. The frosted trees looked like hawthorn bushes flowering before their leaves break forth. We passed through Champrosay, as dismal and silent as the hoar-frost which was falling and lying on its cold roofs, instead of gently melting round the water-spouts by the warmth of the lighted fires. Not a Prussian was to be seen on the horizon, and this was fortunate, as our two outlines stood out distinctly in the great bare plain. I found my boat in a little creek hidden between the banks. It was a very lightly-built Norwegian boat. Having wrapped some rags round the oars, we pushed off noiselessly on the lonely river, knocking now and then against the icicles which float on the surface of the water like blocks of crystal. Many a time, in preceding years, I had embarked on nights as dark and cold to set or visit my night-lines. But what life there was on the river around me! A somewhat mysterious, dreamy sort of life, full of the silence of universal slumber. Long wood rafts, with their fires lighted fore and aft, and shadows standing near the helm, slowly go down towards Paris, gliding by through all the forest shade, and entering Bercy at break of day, in the full glare of a noisy and crowded thoroughfare. On the banks, waggons passed along, the night express train gliding along through the windings of the railway track, like a serpent with eyes of fire. And I pondered over all the sad or joyful motives that set all these people in motion . . . At intervals, by the side of the river, which nearly bathed their walls, the lock-keeper’s house, the ferrymen’s hut, the boatmen’s public-houses, threw the glimmer from their dimmed windows over the still water. [Picture: Wood rafts of former times] To-day there is nothing of all this. We have a new river before us, black and solitary, disturbed by all those broken bridges, which change the currents. However, by a few strokes of the oar I was able to direct our little bark, and keep it near enough to the middle of the stream to avoid the submerged islands marked out by the dipping willows . . . [Picture: “We crossed a heavy punt.”] —All goes well . . . said Goudeloup in a low voice. At that moment the noise of an oar thrown into a boat, came from the bank, and a powerful southern voice called through the night: —Come, ferryman, make haste! . . . —It is the Draveil doctor, whispered my companion.