VI. 
               Whene’er my maiden kisses me,
               I’ll think that I the Sultan be;
               And when my cheery glass I tope,
               I’ll fancy then I am the Pope.

CHAPTER XLIII.

THE JOURNEY.

It was with a feeling of pleasure I cannot explain, that I awoke in the morning, and found myself upon the road.  The turmoil, the bustle, the never-ending difficulties of my late life in Paris had so over-excited and worried me, that I could neither think nor reflect.  Now all these cares and troubles were behind me, and I felt like a liberated prisoner as I looked upon the grey dawn of the coming day, as it gradually melted from its dull and leaden tint to the pink and yellow hue of the rising sun.  The broad and richly-coloured plains of “la belle France” were before me—­and it is “la belle France,” however inferior to parts of England in rural beauty—­the large tracts of waving yellow corn, undulating like a sea in the morning breeze—­the interminable reaches of forest, upon which the shadows played and flitted, deepening the effect and mellowing the mass, as we see them in Ruysdael’s pictures—­while now and then some tall-gabled, antiquated chateau, with its mutilated terrace and dowager-like air of bye-gone grandeur, would peep forth at the end of some long avenue of lime trees, all having their own features of beauty—­and a beauty with which every object around harmonizes well.  The sluggish peasant, in his blouse and striped night-cap—­the heavily caparisoned horse, shaking his head amidst a Babel-tower of gaudy worsted tassels and brass bells—­the deeply laden waggon, creeping slowly along—­are all in keeping with a scene, where the very mist that rises from the valley seems indolent and lazy, and unwilling to impart the rich perfume of verdure with which it is loaded.  Every land has its own peculiar character of beauty.  The glaciered mountain, the Alpine peak, the dashing cataract of Switzerland and the Tyrol, are not finer in their way than the long flat moorlands of a Flemish landscape, with its clump of stunted willows cloistering over some limpid brook, in which the oxen are standing for shelter from the noon-day heat—­while, lower down, some rude water-wheel is mingling its sounds with the summer bees and the merry voices of the miller and his companions.  So strayed my thoughts as the German shook me by the arm, and asked if “I were not ready for my breakfast?” Luckily to this question there is rarely but the one answer.  Who is not ready for his breakfast when on the road?  How delightful, if on the continent, to escape from the narrow limits of the dungeon-like diligence, where you sit with your knees next your collar-bone, fainting with heat and suffocated by dust, and find yourself suddenly beside the tempting “plats” of a little French dejeune, with its cutlets, its fried fish, its poulet, its salad, and its little entre of