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All these interior arrangements were without the makeshifts so often found in houseboats. There were no curtains for partition walls nor crude bunks for beds. People aboard a houseboat must at best be living in close quarters.
They were all specially spick and span just now, having been newly painted and garnished with flowers for the season; and Toni looked across the river with frank interest at the Cot, the Dinky House, the Mascot, and the rest of the tiny shanties. She liked the houseboats, too, with their gaily-striped awnings, their hanging baskets filled with gaudy pink geraniums and bright lobelia.
There may also have been Cambridge barges, spirited through the air in default of water for towing them to Henley, but I make sure only of a gay variety of houseboats stretching up and down the grassy margin of the stream, along the course the rowers were to take.
Ten miles below Henderson, was a little fleet of houseboats, lying in a thicket of willows along the Indiana beach. We stopped at one of them, and bought a small catfish for dinner. The fishermen seemed a happy company, in this isolated spot.
I long to see a Chinese village once more built of mud and fenced with mud, muddy-roaded and muddy-baked, with a muddy little stream to be waded across or passed by stepping on stones; with a delicate one-storeyed temple on the water-eaten bank, and green poppy fields round it; and the women in dark blue standing at the doorways, smoking their pipes; and the children, with three small budding pigtails on the head of each, clinging to them; and the river fringed with a thousand masts: the boats, the houseboats, the barges and the ships in the calm, wide estuaries, each with a pair of huge eyes painted on the front bow.
They formed the only feature of their travel which our tourists found absolutely novel; they could clearly or dimly recall from the past every other feature but the houseboats, which they instantly and gladly naturalized to their memories of it.
I am not referring to the vulgar achievements of mere wealth. Wherever these people went, to be sure, they left outposts a Mediterranean villa, a deer forest behind the Grampians, small Saturday-to-Monday establishments beside the Thames and the North Sea, and furnished abodes on short leases near Newmarket and Ascot Heaths; not to mention nomadic trifles such as houseboats and yachts.
We met at intervals to-day, several houseboats, the most of them bearing the inscription prescribed by the new Kentucky license law, which is now being enforced, the essential features of which inscription are the home and name of the owner, and the date at which the license expires.
Later I heard that sweet grapes grow abundantly in Kabul, west of Kashmir. We consoled ourselves with ice cream made of RABRI, a heavily condensed milk, and flavored with whole pistachio nuts. We took several trips in the SHIKARAS or houseboats, shaded by red-embroidered canopies, coursing along the intricate channels of Dal Lake, a network of canals like a watery spider web.
The result was that of Hong Kong he carried away no immediate personal impression, beyond a vague jumble, in the background of consciousness, of Buddhist temples and British red-jackets, of stately parks and granite buildings, of mixed nationalities and native theaters, of anchored warships and a floating city of houseboats.
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