I had a great deal of healthy pleasure from their manoeuvres, and took good care to miss as few performances as possible; and I found that even the Cigarette, while he pretended to despise my enthusiasm, was more or less a devotee himself.  There is something highly absurd in the exposition of such toys to the outrages of winter on a housetop.  They would be more in keeping in a glass case before a Nurnberg clock.  Above all, at night, when the children are abed, and even grown people are snoring under quilts, does it not seem impertinent to leave these ginger-bread figures winking and tinkling to the stars and the rolling moon?  The gargoyles may fitly enough twist their ape-like heads; fitly enough may the potentate bestride his charger, like a centurion in an old German print of the Via Dolorosa; but the toys should be put away in a box among some cotton, until the sun rises, and the children are abroad again to be amused.

In Compiegne post-office a great packet of letters awaited us; and the authorities were, for this occasion only, so polite as to hand them over upon application.

In some ways, our journey may be said to end with this letter-bag at Compiegne.  The spell was broken.  We had partly come home from that moment.

No one should have any correspondence on a journey; it is bad enough to have to write; but the receipt of letters is the death of all holiday feeling.

‘Out of my country and myself I go.’  I wish to take a dive among new conditions for a while, as into another element.  I have nothing to do with my friends or my affections for the time; when I came away, I left my heart at home in a desk, or sent it forward with my portmanteau to await me at my destination.  After my journey is over, I shall not fail to read your admirable letters with the attention they deserve.  But I have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes, for no other purpose than to be abroad; and yet you keep me at home with your perpetual communications.  You tug the string, and I feel that I am a tethered bird.  You pursue me all over Europe with the little vexations that I came away to avoid.  There is no discharge in the war of life, I am well aware; but shall there not be so much as a week’s furlough?

We were up by six, the day we were to leave.  They had taken so little note of us that I hardly thought they would have condescended on a bill.  But they did, with some smart particulars too; and we paid in a civilised manner to an uninterested clerk, and went out of that hotel, with the india-rubber bags, unremarked.  No one cared to know about us.  It is not possible to rise before a village; but Compiegne was so grown a town, that it took its ease in the morning; and we were up and away while it was still in dressing-gown and slippers.  The streets were left to people washing door-steps; nobody was in full dress but the cavaliers upon the town-hall; they were all washed with dew, spruce in their gilding, and full of intelligence and a sense of professional responsibility.  Kling went they on the bells for the half-past six as we went by.  I took it kind of them to make me this parting compliment; they never were in better form, not even at noon upon a Sunday.