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Many people to whom I have told the adventure have laughed at me. I no longer know what to think. The wise man says: Perhaps? July 21. I dined at Bougival, and then I spent the evening at a boatmen's ball. Decidedly everything depends on place and surroundings. It would be the height of folly to believe in the supernatural on the Ile de la Grenouilliere.
A boat came in at this moment, and the pleasant shout of the boatmen's voices, and the grating of the little craft as it landed on the pebbly shore, attracted the young lady's notice, and she stood for a few moments to watch the proceedings.
No doubt Lincoln went, too, to live in the boatmen's rendezvous, called the "Swamp," a wild, rough quarter, where roulette, whiskey, and the flint-lock pistol ruled. All of the picturesque life, the violent contrasts of the city, he would see as he wandered about; and he would carry away the sharp impressions which are produced when mind and heart are alert, sincere, and healthy.
And it was said on Board that they would not unfrequently decoy by false signals, or positively haul, a vessel in distress on to those same Goodwins, in whose fatal depths so many tall Ships lie Engulfed, in order to have the Plunder of her, which was more profitable than the Salvage, that being in the long-run mostly swallowed up by the Crimps and Longshore Lawyers of Deal and other Ports, who were wont to buy the Boatmen's rights at a Ruinous Discount.
The day was beginning to decline; the boatmen's voices died away; Hassan, in obedience to Ibrahim's order, brought out tea to his mistress in the garden. When he had finished arranging it, he stood near her for a moment, looking across the water to Baroudi's big white dahabeeyah, which was tied up against the bank a little way down the river. In his eyes there were yellow lights.
But a very different voice was now to be heard the hoarse thunder rolling up, like advancing artillery; first growling, then roaring, and presently crashing and rattling overhead. The boatmen's thoughts were for the ladies, exposed as they were, without the possibility of putting up umbrellas.
He perceived the teeming harbor clogged with junks and house-boats, the muddy river, an artery out of the heart of darkness, the fantastic, colored shore-lines, the vast, dull drone of heathendom stirring in his ears, the temple gongs calling blindly to the blind, the alluring and incomprehensible accents of the boatmen's tongue which he was to have made his own and lightened with the fierce sweet name of the Cross and now could not.
Then, calling up the corporal and the five soldiers, he fastened the Cross on their breast, appointed them knights of the Empire, and gave them an annuity of 1,200 francs apiece. All the veterans wept for joy. Next came the boatmen's turn.
Jumping over the bales of silk, he swung over his head a matchlock he had seized from one of his peons, and brought it down with a horizontal sweep. Two of the Bengalis among the crowd of lathiwallahs, who were hanging back out of reach of the boatmen's pikes, were swept off the cart.
Bands, it is true, they possess not, but they have the music of their own, and boatmen's voices, and the rippling of the current over the pebbly shallow, or the impetuous dashing of some distant waterfall while on every side the eye is arrested by images of grandeur, which dispose the heart to benevolence, towards man, and the soul to adoration towards the Creator.
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