"Ah, then," he says in broken English, "I go to couch myself. I salute you the good morning, Mister and Missis. I have well envy of to sleep." And thank goodness in another minute the high-spirited Solicitor is fast asleep, and notsnoring.
Then we all drop off. At Montargis he awakes, breakfasts at the buffet: we breakfast in our salon. He returns, puffing another cigar, stronger and bigger than the previous one: but smoking yields to sleeping and his high spirits become less and less. After his second or third sleep he becomes hungry. The train is late. He becomes hungrier and hungrier. Again he smokes; but his cigars are dwindling in size and growing paler in colour. He calculates when the hour of dinner will be. He foresees that it will not be till past eight and we breakfasted at eleven. Hunger has deprived him of all his jokes, all his high spirits; he is hopelessly depressed, and preserves an almost sullen silence till we reach Clermont-Ferrand, when the sight of the Commissionnaire of the Hôtel Continental slightly restores him, and as we get into the Omnibus he whispers to me feebly, "I say, let's cry 'ViveBoulanger!'"
I beg him to hold his tongue, or the police will be down on him. I fancy this warning has its effect, in his present state of hunger, as he limits himself to whispering out of the window to any passer-by who happens to be in uniform, "ViveBoulanger!" but I am bound to say, nobody hears him, so finding the fun of the jest exhausted within the first ten minutes, he drops it, and once more collapses, shakes his head wearily over his wretched state, and expresses in pantomime how he is dying for something to eat. Jane and myself recognise Clermont-Ferrand and draw one another's attention to all points of interest, more or less incorrectly. Then, after noticing how familiar all the land-marks seem en route, we find we have been taken by a different road from the one we need to travel in order to avoid the dust.
Ha! Here is Doctor Rem. Welcome to Royat! Same rooms, New Proprietor, but same Hotel in effect, it is the Continental. M. Hall, of what nationality I do not know, exerts himself to see that everything shall be right for everybody who has just arrived. There are several others by this train, all requiring special and individual attention, and all, somehow, getting it. New faces, but civility and readiness to oblige everywhere. The weather perfect!—perhaps a trifle too perfect. But Royat is high up, and, if it is hot here, what must it be down below at Vichy or at Aix! Dinner in the Restauration of the Hotel, where we pant for air because other visitors, chiefly French, of advanced years and in various stages of "The Cure," will not allow a door or window to be opened. We finish dinner, and hurry off for our coffee in the garden of the Casino Samie. End of first day.
P.S.—I said last week I could not find the English newspapers in the reading-room of the Cercle. I have since seen them, Timesand Telegraph. But the only one sold outside is apparently the Morning Post. Lord Salisbury is coming.
THE INSURER'S PHRASE-BOOK.
There is no truth in the report that a whole Brigade of Firemen and Sixteen Fire-engines are now permanently encamped in Kensington Gardens Square, and that Captain Shaw is about to take furnished lodgings in the immediate neighbourhood of Westbourne Grove.
No, those men walking up and down the shop and eying everybody suspiciously are not shop-walkers, as you suppose. Four of them are detectives, with orders summarily to arrest any customer who looks at all like an incendiary, and the others are disguised Firemen.
