Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE COCKROACHES. 0 THINGS of my childhood ! What an impression you have left upon me! It seems to me that journey on the Rhone was only yesterday. I can still see the boat and its passengers and crew. The captain’s name was Genies, the chief cook’s, Mont6limart. Such things are not forgotten. The voyage lasted three days. I passed those three days on deck, going below only to eat and sleep. The rest of the time I stationed myself at the end of the bow near the anchor. There was a great gong there that was rung when we entered the towns; I sat down beside this gong among heaps of rope, placed the parrot’s cage between my legs, and looked about. The Rhone was so broad that I could scarcely see the banks, but 1 could have wished that it were still wider and that it were called
the sea. The sky was bright, and the water green; large barges moved down with the current. Boatmen, fording the stream on the backs of mules, passed near us, singing. Occasionally the boat went by some tufted island, covered with reeds and willows.
Oh, a desert island !
said I to myself, and devoured it with my eyes. - ‘ Toward the end of the third day I thought we were going to have a shower. The sky had suddenly grown dark; a thick mist floated above the stream; in front of the'ship a large lantern was lighted, and, in view of these signs, I began to be excited. At this moment, somebody near me said:
There is Lyons !
At the same time the great gong began to ring. It was Lyons. I saw dimly, through the fog, lights burning on both shores; we passed under one bridge, then under another. Every time, the enormous funnel of the engine bent double and vomited torrents of black smoke that made me cough. On the boat, there was a terrible commotion. The passengers were looking …