"expositions," it seemed to me to be full of ugly
things, and gave one a portentous idea of the quantity
of rubbish that man carries with him on his course
through the ages. Such an amount of luggage for a
journey after all so short! There were no individual
objects; there was nothing but dozens and hundreds,
all machine-made and expressionless, in spite of the
repeated grimace, the conscious smartness, of "the last
new thing," that was stamped on all of them. The
fatal facility, of the French _article_ becomes at last as
irritating as the refrain of a popular song. The poor
"Indiens Galibis" struck me as really more interesting,
- a group of stunted savages who formed one of the
attractions of the place, and were confined in a pen
in the open air, with a rabble of people pushing and
squeezing, hanging over the barrier, to look at them.
They had no grimace, no pretension to be new, no
desire to catch your eye. They looked at their visitors
no more than they looked at each other, and seemed
ancient, indifferent, terribly bored.



XIX.

There is much entertainment in the journey through
the wide, smiling garden of Gascony; I speak of it as
I took it in going from Bordeaux to Toulouse. It is
the south, quite the south, and had for the present
narrator its full measure of the charm he is always