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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.
Right glad we were, at luncheon-time, to find a sheltered nook amidst a heap of boulders on the Kentucky shore, and to sit on the sun-warmed sand and drink hot tea by the side of a camp-fire, rejoicing in the kindness of Providence. There are few houseboats, since leaving Louisville; to-day we have seen but three or four one of them merrily going up stream, under full sail.
At this, coming from Nan, Johnnie had nothing to say, except that he murmured, as he walked away: "Huh! A houseboat's nothing. We've got a baby at our house, and it's got hair on its head, and two teeth!" "A houseboat's better'n a baby," was Freddie's opinion. "It is not!" cried Johnnie. "It is so!" Freddie exclaimed. "Hush!" begged Nan. "Please don't dispute. Houseboats and babies are both nice.
So that all this religious stir, which seems so multifold and incidental and disconnected and confused and entirely ineffective to-day, may be and most probably will be, in quite a few years a great flood of religious unanimity pouring over and changing all human affairs, sweeping away the old priesthoods and tabernacles and symbols and shrines, the last crumb of the Orphic victim and the last rag of the Serapeum, and turning all men about into one direction, as the ships and houseboats swing round together in some great river with the uprush of the tide. . . .
"It's all right on such a night," replied Ed, "but houseboats, I believe, cost money, and our camp is rented to us for the season. Oh fickle Wallie! To fall in love with a motor boat, just because her name is Pet." Walter was talking to Cora before Ed had finished speaking to him. That was Walter's irresistible way with the girls.
Think of the men, women, children and the little babies crushed and mangled amid the wreck of shattered homes but yesterday as beautiful and bright as ours the pallid faces of hundreds floating as corpses in the stately streets turned into rushing rivers by the relentless floods brothers and sisters of ours, freezing and starving in homes turned suddenly into broken rafts and battered houseboats amid the muddy deluge, while the pitying stars look down at night upon thousands, wet, weeping, shivering, hungry, helpless and homeless, with the host of their unrecognized and unburied dead, in this frightful holocaust of fire and flood and pestilence.
About ten miles from Oxford we passed through Henley-on-Thames, famed for the University rowing-matches. Here the river lies in broad still stretches that afford an ideal place for the contests. The Thames is navigable for small steamboats and houseboats from London to Oxford, a distance of sixty miles, and the shores of the stream throughout afford scenes of surpassing beauty.
A reasonable degree of care at all times, however, and keeping the boat drawn high on the beach when not in use, such care as we are familiar with upon our Wisconsin inland lakes, would render the employment of such as she quite practicable, and greatly lessen the labor of rowing on this waterway. The houseboats, dozens of which we see daily, interest us greatly.
We elders linger long by the last camp-fire, to talk in fond reminiscence of the six weeks afloat; while the Boy no doubt dreams peacefully of houseboats and fishermen, of gigantic bridges and flashing steel-plants, of coal-mines and oil-wells, of pioneers and Indians, and all that of six weeks of kaleidoscopic sensations, at an age when the mind is keenly active, and the heart open to impressions which can never be dimmed so long as his little life shall last.
The days rolled on in ever-changing scenes of beauty; the nights, star-gemmed and mystic, were filled with music and the witchery of the sea. It made good reading. It made altogether too good reading. We did not see that then. We did not know that most of the literature of houseboating is the work of people with plenty of imagination and no houseboats. We resolved to build a houseboat.
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