The next morning we took our places in the P.L.M. Rapide and went whirling away over the pleasant lands of Southern France, through Lyons, Dijon, and Maçon, to Paris and thence to Calais in trains that were well worthy to run over the same metals as the “South Western Limited,” and the “Overland.”
Then came the usual bucketing across the Channel, and after that a crawl of seventy-six miles in two hours and thirty-five minutes in a dirty, rickety, first-class compartment on one of the alleged expresses of the Amalgamated Crawlers. The splendid corridor train of the Nord had covered the hundred and eighty-five miles between Paris and Calais inside four hours; but that was in France. Still the “boat-express” did at last manage to struggle into Charing Cross, and I found myself standing in the familiar Strand once more. The thirty-thousand-mile trip was finished, and Prisonland with all its new experiences and varied memories was itself now only a memory.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Since my return, I find that there has been a recrudescence of this fiscal foolishness in New York with an addition of personal persecution. By the time these pages are in my readers’ hands the autocrats of the inquisition will probably have heard something drop. To bully the American Woman is too large an order even for the Great Republic.
[2] With true French economy the price of the chain is charged against the convict’s “Succession”—i.e. any deferred savings that he may leave behind him.
[3] Les Sœurs de St. Joseph de Cluny.
THE END.
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