may be--the sun shines brighter than you have seen it for a year,
the sky is a thousand times bluer, and what a cheery clatter of
shrill quick French voices comes up from the court-yard under the
windows! Bells are jangling; a family, mayhap, is going to Paris,
en poste, and wondrous is the jabber of the courier, the postilion,
the inn-waiters, and the lookers-on. The landlord calls out for
"Quatre biftecks aux pommes pour le trente-trois,"--(O my
countrymen, I love your tastes and your ways!)--the chambermaid is
laughing and says, "Finissez donc, Monsieur Pierre!" (what can they
be about?)--a fat Englishman has opened his window violently, and
says, "Dee dong, garsong, vooly voo me donny lo sho, ou vooly voo
pah?" He has been ringing for half an hour--the last energetic
appeal succeeds, and shortly he is enabled to descend to the
coffee-room, where, with three hot rolls, grilled ham, cold fowl,
and four boiled eggs, he makes what he calls his first FRENCH
breakfast.

It is a strange, mongrel, merry place, this town of Boulogne; the
little French fishermen's children are beautiful, and the little
French soldiers, four feet high, red-breeched, with huge pompons on
their caps, and brown faces, and clear sharp eyes, look, for all
their littleness, far more military and more intelligent than the
heavy louts one has seen swaggering about the garrison towns in
England. Yonder go a crowd of bare-legged fishermen; there is the
town idiot, mocking a woman who is screaming "Fleuve du Tage," at
an inn-window, to a harp, and there are the little gamins mocking
HIM. Lo! these seven young ladies, with red hair and green veils,
they are from neighboring Albion, and going to bathe. Here comes
three Englishmen, habitues evidently of the place,--dandy specimens
of our countrymen: one wears a marine dress, another has a shooting