We had feet-warmers in the carriage, but the cold crept in nevertheless;
and I do not remember hardly in my life a more disagreeable short journey
than this, my first advance into French territory. My impression of
France will always be that it is an Arctic region. At any season of the
year, the tract over which we passed yesterday must be an uninteresting
one as regards its natural features; and the only adornment, as far as I
could observe, which art has given it, consists in straight rows of very
stiff-looking and slender-stemmed trees. In the dusk they resembled
poplar-trees.

Weary and frost-bitten,--morally, if not physically,--we reached Amiens
in three or four hours, and here I underwent much annoyance from the
French railway officials and attendants, who, I believe, did not mean to
incommode me, but rather to forward my purposes as far as they well
could. If they would speak slowly and distinctly I might understand them
well enough, being perfectly familiar with the written language, and
knowing the principles of its pronunciation; but, in their customary
rapid utterance, it sounds like a string of mere gabble. When left to
myself, therefore, I got into great difficulties. . . . . It gives a
taciturn personage like myself a new conception as to the value of
speech, even to him, when he finds himself unable either to speak or
understand.

Finally, being advised on all hands to go to the Hotel du Rhin, we were
carried thither in an omnibus, rattling over a rough pavement, through an
invisible and frozen town; and, on our arrival, were ushered into a
handsome salon, as chill as a tomb. They made a little bit of a
wood-fire for us in a low and deep chimney-hole, which let a hundred
times more heat escape up the flue than it sent into the room.