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 fruit, tempered with a not despicable bottle of Beaune.  If in England, the exchange is nearly as grateful—­for though our travelling be better, and our equipage less “genante,” still it is no small alterative from the stage-coach to the inn parlour, redolent of aromatic black tea, eggs, and hot toast, with a hospitable side-board of red, raw surloins, and York hams, that would made a Jew’s mouth water.  While, in America, the change is greatest of all, as any one can vouch for who has been suddenly emancipated from the stove-heat of a “nine-inside” leathern “conveniency,” bumping ten miles an hour over a corduroy road, the company smoking, if not worse; to the ample display of luxurious viands displayed upon the breakfast-table, where, what with buffalo steaks, pumpkin pie, gin cock-tail, and other aristocratically called temptations, he must be indeed