I wrote a book in many respects of the same kind many years subsequently, giving an account of a journey through certain little-visited districts of central Italy, under the title of a Lenten Journey.  It is not, I think, so good a book as my French journeys furnished, mainly to my mind because it was in one small volume instead of two big ones, and both for want of space and want of time was done hurriedly and too compendiously.  The true motto for the writer of such a book is nihil a me alienum puto, whether humanum or otherwise.  My own opinion is, to make a perfectly clean breast of it, that I could now write a fairly amusing book on a journey from Tyburn turnpike to Stoke Pogis.  But then such books should be addressed to readers who are not in such a tearing hurry as the unhappy world is in these latter days.

It would seem that I found my two octavo volumes did not afford me nearly enough space to say my say respecting the country traversed, for they are brought to an end somewhat abruptly by a hurried return from Limoges to Paris; whereas my ramble was much more extended, including both the upper and lower provinces of Auvergne and the whole of the Bourbonnais.  My voluminous notes of the whole of these wanderings are now before me.  But I will let my readers off easy, recording only that I walked from Murat to St. Flour, a distance of fifteen miles, in five minutes under three hours.  Not bad!  My diary notes that it was frequently very difficult to find my way in walking about Auvergne, from the paucity of people I could find who could speak French, the langue du pays being as unintelligible as Choctaw.  This would hardly be the case now.

I don’t know whether a knot of leading tradesmen at Bordeaux could now be found to talk, as did such a party with whom I got into conversation in that year, 1840.  It was explained to me that England, as was well known, had liberated her slaves in the West Indies perfectly well knowing that the colonies would be absolutely ruined by the measure, but expecting to be amply compensated by the ruin of the French colonies, which would result from the example, and the consequent extension of trade with the East Indies, from which France would be compelled to purchase all the articles her own colonies now supplied her with.  One of these individuals told me and the rest of his audience, that he had the means of knowing that the interest of the English national debt was paid every year by fresh borrowing, and that bankruptcy and absolute smash must occur within a few years.  “Ah!” said a much older, grey-headed man, who had been listening sitting with his hands reposing on his walking-stick before him, and who spoke with a sort of patient, long-expecting hope and a deep sigh, “ah! we have been looking for that many a year; but I am beginning to doubt whether I shall live to see it.”  My assurances that matters were not altogether so bad as they supposed in England of