For several days we have been working our languid way up the Marne. Yesterday we passed through Meaux, and (as I believed) left it many miles behind us, but today we came again close enough to hear its church-bells. This is because of the preposterous looping of the river, which turns in on itself like the arguments of Father Édouard de Gex. This vessel is what they call a chaland, a long, narrow, cheaply made box with but a single square sail that is hoisted whenever the wind happens to come from astern. But most of the time the mast is used only as a hitching-place for tow-ropes by which the chaland is pulled against the current by animals on the banks.