“Very good! The rest of us must go around the world.”
“But we have made a mistake! no one could do it in the time we have set.”
“A common experience, again, sister,” said the chief, who, having the times and seasons in his hands, and having been indulgent enough to stay on from day to day, was at last in a somewhat inexorable mood.
And though there was still some coaxing to stay, one bright morning found us fairly started on our dance “out of England into France.”
The morning of our departure is fine; the air delicious, a fresh breeze blowing from the west. A good course of packing lasting well into the night added physical weariness to the rather thin layer of mental fatigue consequent on keeping a journal, and therefore London seems less attractive than it did. If it were not for a faint foreboding sense that the Channel lies just before, we could even begin to be glad that the metropolis is left behind. The chief does not say, “I told you so” as he sees our spirits rise, but then the chief is—not a woman. It is soon over,—the three hours of grace that it takes us to whirl down to Folkestone, and it’s three hours of pleasure, except the last few minutes when we catch the mocking toss of the saucy white-caps on the waves. We rejoiced this morning in the wind that scattered the London fog, but now we know how felt Lot’s wife in that dire day of Sodom. Bravely as possible we march to our fate. The wicked scribe can not forbear asking the chief whose white cheeks contradict his defiant expression, if he is glad he “made her dance.” We hear people in various stages of resistance saying “this is not bad; that the channel is often worse.” “No doubt! no doubt!” but we do not care to discuss it, and the photographs of the quartette would show them seated lugubriously, with their backs to the smoke-stack, not coldly unsocial, but each meditating profoundly on topics that are not to the others of the slightest concern. They are meditating only, and, meantime that smoke-stack rides up into the air, and they with it, and it fairly seems to be intoxicated at its upper end, yet they hold fast to it and to each other down below; and then it changes its mind and seems to go down and down, until they feel as if they were in the fast diminishing turret of a monitor, and that the bottom is dropping out of the depth of the sea.
And yet they live, and revive, and when the boat touches Boulogne-sur-Mer, are ready for the French-English table d’hôte served at the railway restaurant, and the scribe at least is ready for a walk to the heights above the town, “just to look back to old England, you know,” and see what Napoleon saw when he gathered his army of nearly two hundred thousand men along this coast, and filled the harbor with his ships, and watched and waited his chance to go over and take the British bull by the horns.
“Think, sister, how the fate of the nations might have been changed, if only Napoleon had gone”—says the chief thoughtfully.
“Now, brother, if you are going to meditate, or moralize, we shall miss the train,” answers the scribe.
He looks at her gravely. “I am afraid,” he says under his breath, “that my next duty will be to train that miss.”
(To be continued.)