Hi!' and away we go. He is sure to have a contest with his horse
before we have gone very far; and then he calls him a Thief, and a
Brigand, and a Pig, and what not; and beats him about the head as
if he were made of wood.

There is little more than one variety in the appearance of the
country, for the first two days. From a dreary plain, to an
interminable avenue, and from an interminable avenue to a dreary
plain again. Plenty of vines there are in the open fields, but of
a short low kind, and not trained in festoons, but about straight
sticks. Beggars innumerable there are, everywhere; but an
extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer children than I ever
encountered. I don't believe we saw a hundred children between
Paris and Chalons. Queer old towns, draw-bridged and walled: with
odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the
wall had put a mask on, and were staring down into the moat; other
strange little towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes, and
in farm-yards: all alone, and always round, with a peaked roof,
and never used for any purpose at all; ruinous buildings of all
sorts; sometimes an hotel de ville, sometimes a guard-house,
sometimes a dwelling-house, sometimes a chateau with a rank garden,
prolific in dandelion, and watched over by extinguisher-topped
turrets, and blink-eyed little casements; are the standard objects,
repeated over and over again. Sometimes we pass a village inn,
with a crumbling wall belonging to it, and a perfect town of out-
houses; and painted over the gateway, 'Stabling for Sixty Horses;'
as indeed there might be stabling for sixty score, were there any
horses to be stabled there, or anybody resting there, or anything
stirring about the place but a dangling bush, indicative of the
wine inside: which flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with