“‘You may if you please,’ replied the commissary.

  “‘Your most obedient servant,’ said I, making him a low bow.

“The commissary, with all the sincerity of grave good-breeding, made me one as low again.  I never was more disconcerted by a bow in my life.  ‘The devil take the serious character of these people,’ said I, aside; ‘they understand no more of irony than this.’  The comparison was standing close by with her panniers, but something sealed up my lips.  I could not pronounce the name.

  “‘Sir,’ said I, collecting myself, ’it is not my intention to take
  post.’

  “‘But you may,’ said he, persisting in his first reply.  ’You may
  if you choose.’

  “’And I may take salt to my pickled herring if I choose.[1] But I
  do not choose.’

  “‘But you must pay for it, whether you do or no.’

  “‘Ay, for the salt,’ said I, ‘I know.’

  “‘And for the post, too,’ added he.

  “‘Defend me!’ cried I.  ’I travel by water.  I am going down the
  Rhone this very afternoon; my baggage is in the boat, and I have
  actually paid nine livres for my passage.’

  “‘C’est tout egal—­’tis all one,’ said he.

  “’Bon Dieu!  What! pay for the way I go and for the way I do
  not go?’

  “‘C’est tout egal,’ replied the commissary.

“‘The devil it is!’ said I.  ’But I will go to ten thousand Bastilles first.  O, England!  England! thou land of liberty and climate of good-sense! thou tenderest of mothers and gentlest of nurses!’ cried I, kneeling upon one knee as I was beginning my apostrophe—­when the director of Madame L. Blanc’s conscience coming in at that instant, and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at his devotions, asked if I stood in want of the aids of the Church.

  “‘I go by water,’ said I, ’and here’s another will be for making
  me pay for going by oil.’”

[Footnote 1:  It is the penalty—­I suppose the just penalty—­paid by habitually extravagant humourists, that meaning not being always expected of them, it is not always sought by their readers with sufficient care.  Anyhow, it may be suspected that this retort of Tristram’s is too often passed over as a mere random absurdity designed for his interlocutor’s mystification, and that its extremely felicitous pertinence to the question in dispute is thus overlooked.  The point of it, of course, is that the business in which the commissary was then engaged was precisely analogous to that of exacting salt dues from perverse persons who were impoverishing the revenue by possessing herrings already pickled.]

The commissary, of course, remains obdurate, and Tristram protests that the treatment to which he is being subjected is “contrary to the law of nature, contrary to reason, contrary to the Gospel:” 

  “‘But not to this,’ said he, putting a printed paper into my hand.