Oh, the delights of once more entering an establishment where the polished floors shone with cleanliness, where the paper did not hang in foul strips from the walls, where indescribable odours did not greet one from every open window and up every staircase, and where the reptile and the insect knew no abiding-place! Oh, the revelling in tubs and cold water, the luxury of a bell with some one to answer it, and the charms of bread not sour, and butter that could be eaten!
Howsoever beautiful be nature, the most æsthetic mind is too much a slave to the vile body to know perfect mental enjoyment when living in constant dread of physical discomfort and disgust. Any one who has ever travelled out of the beaten track will understand the joy with which we took possession of our dainty little rooms at Ajaccio, after our week's roughing, and will excuse this rhapsody.
CHAPTER XV.
THE TOWN OF AJACCIO.
English people are apt, at Ajaccio, to incur a good deal of public obloquy and well-merited contempt by their pronunciation of the name. In their Northern ignorance, they are accustomed to pronounce the two c's soft; and find considerable difficulty in schooling their tongues to the popular sneeze-like intonation.
In this dilemma, I bethought me of a plan adopted by a fond and phonetic mother I had known years ago, to cure a failing common amongst those of tender years, viz., the adding of an agreeable but unnecessary r to those Christian names which terminate in a vowel, and by whom the following couplet was composed, to be repeated twenty times daily by her children—
"Give Anna-an apple, and Julia-a cake;
Send Maria-Eliza-afloat on the lake."
Acting on this precedent, I put my poetic muse to work, and, in an incredibly short space of time, had composed this chaste and elegant refrain—
"Ajaccio! Ajaccio!