TO those who call vexations vexations, as knowing what they are, there could not be a greater than to be the best part of a day at Lyons, the most opulent and flourishing city in France. It has an old cathedral, a castle on a hillside, ruins if I be not mistaken, two rivers, and I know not what besides. Baedeker devotes pages to it. Moreover, there is associated with it a story, that, to quote Mr. Tristram Shandy, who tells it, affords more pabulum to the brain than all the Frusts and Crusts and Rusts of antiquity, which travellers can cook up for it. You remember the tale? It is that of fond lovers, cruelly separated.——
Amandus—He,
Amanda—She,
each ignorant of the other’s course;
He—east,
She—west;
and finally, to cut it short, after long years of wandering for the one, imprisonment for the other, both coming unexpectedly at the same moment of the night, though by different ways, to the gate of Lyons, their native city, and each in well-known accents calling out aloud——
| Is Amandus | - still alive? |
| Is my Amanda |
then, flying into each other’s arms, and both falling down dead for joy, to be buried in the tomb upon which Mr. Shandy had a tear ready to drop. But, alas! when he came—there was no tomb to drop it upon!
We expected letters, and began the day by a visit to the Post Office, where the clerk, after the manner of his kind in all countries, received and dismissed us with contemptuous incivility.—To be rid of all business, we next went to the Crédit Lyonnais to have some Bank of England notes changed for French gold. But the cashier looked at them and us with distrust, and would have nothing to do with our money.——
Where was our reference? he asked.
This was more than enough to put us in ill-humour. But J——, having looked up in his C. T. C. Handbook the address of the agent for cycle repairs in Lyons, and his place being found with difficulty, we walked in, under a pretext of asking about the road to Vienne, but really, I think, in search of sympathy.