308 The Unknown River. 



safety : and the most interesting life to live, like the best 

 river to explore, is one in which the course is not known 

 in detail beforehand, but constantly calls for the exercise 

 of skill and judgment, and is even to some degree 

 affected also by pure hazard. 



The tiny hamlets on the shores of the river were often 

 very beautiful in their way, or, at least, very picturesque, 

 and quite unspoiled by any modern perfections and reg- 

 ularities of brickwork or of roof. Many of the best of 

 these hamlets are of great antiquity. I know one where 

 the cottages have not received any important addition, 

 and have not been repaired in any other sense than that 

 of simply replacing parts as they decayed, for the last 

 four or five hundred years. And the life in them has 

 followed the same unswerving tradition. The language, 

 the religion, the customs, of the inhabitants remain al- 

 most precisely what they were in the Middle Ages. The 

 oxen are yoked to the char as they were centuries ago ; 

 the char itself is a precise copy of that used by remote 

 ancestors ; the ploughs and other implements of agri- 

 culture are untouched by modern improvement. We 

 know little of the lives that are led in these out-of-the- 

 way cottages and hamlets, because it is so difficult for 

 us to get rid of London and Paris, of literature and sci- 

 ence, and modern thought and reflection ; so difficult 

 to realize what a life must be which neither London nor 

 Paris influences in any perceptible way whatever ; a life 

 quite beyond the range of literature, inaccessible even 

 to the cheapest of cheap newspapers, ignorant of every 

 thing which makes us men of the nineteenth century 



