THE RHONE

ANGUS B. REACH

FEW travellers have much fancy for the most rapid of
the great European streams. If they at all make its
personal acquaintance, it is with knapsack on back, and
iron-shod baton in hand — when they stand upon the mother-
glacier, and watch the river-child glide brightly into air — or
perhaps it is near fair Geneva, that, loitering on a wooden
bridge, they mark the second start in life of the strong river,
and, if they be philosophers, lament the clamorous and not
cleanly Arve. Later in the river's career — the pellucid
waters of the snow are again and still more fatally fouled
by the slow-running Saone which comes down by Lyons,
heavy and fat with the rich mud of Burgundy. At the
point of junction there, also, the tourist sometimes goes to
observe the coalition of the streams, and to find out, that
instead of the bigger river cleansing the smaller, the smaller
utterly besmirches and begrimes the greater. So pondering
over the moral, he too often takes little further heed of the
Rhone ; or if he does, it is as a mere beast of burden. He
is bound south, and he knows that the ^^ swift and arrowy
Rhone " will add wings to the speed of steam ; that step-
ping on board the long, long steamboat from the noble
quays of Lyons at summer's dawn, he will step ashore amid
the clamour of the uproarious Avignon porters by the sum-
mer's eve. But the day's flight — through rocks, and vines,
and corn-lands, and by ancient towns and villages, and



322 THE RHONE

through old bridges of stone, and modern bridges of boats,
is to the conventional traveller usually nearly a blank.
