or three hours before the spectator was in all the prose of London.

For those who love novel and picturesque memories or scenes, there are
few things more effective or pleasant to think of than one of these
Sunday mornings in a strange unfamiliar French town, when every
corner, and every house and figure--welcome novelty!--are gay as the
costumes and colours in an opera. The night before it was, perhaps,
the horrors of the packet, the cribbing in the cabin, the unutterable
squalor and roughness of all things, the lowest depth of hard, ugly
prose, together with the rudest buffeting and agitation, and poignant
suffering; but, in a few hours, what a 'blessed' change! Now there is
the softness of a dream in the bright cathedral church crowded to the
door, the rites and figures seen afar off, the fuming incense, the
music, the architecture!

During these musings the fiercely glaring clock warns me that time is
running out; but a more singular monitor is the great lighthouse which
rises at the entrance of the town, and goes through its extraordinary,
almost fiendish, performance all the night long. This is truly a
phenomenon. Lighthouses are usually relegated to some pier-end, and
display their gyrations to the congenial ocean. But conceive a monster
of this sort almost _in_ the town itself, revolving ceaselessly,
flashing and flaring into every street and corner of a street, like
some Patagonian policeman with a giant 'bull's-eye.' A more singular,
unearthly effect cannot be conceived. Wherever I stand, in shadow or
out of it, this sudden flashing pursues me. It might be called the
'Demon Lighthouse.' For a moment, in picturesque gloom, watching the
shadows cast by the Hogarthian gateway, I may be thinking of our great
English painter sitting sketching the lean Frenchwomen, noting, too,
the portal where the English arms used to be, when suddenly the 'Demon