Much as men detest new sorts of money in their own country, however, many of us take a childish pleasure on our first arrival in France in handling strange and unfamiliar coins.  One of the great pleasures of travel is changing one’s money.  There is a certain lavishness about the coinage of the Continent that appeals to our curiosity.  Even in getting a five-franc piece we never know whether it will bear the emblem of a republic, a kingdom or an empire.  Coins of Greece and Italy jingle in our pocket with those of the impostor, Louis Napoleon, and those of the wicked Leopold, King of the Belgians.  In Switzerland I remember even getting a Cretan coin, which I was humiliated by being unable to pass at a post office.  The postal official took down a huge diagram containing pictures of all the European coins he was allowed to accept.  He studied Greek coins and, for all I know, Jugo-Slav coins, but nowhere could he find the image of the coin I had proffered him.  Crete for him did not exist.  He shook his head solemnly and handed the coin back.  Is there any situation in which a man feels guiltier than when his money is thrust back on him as of no value?  This happens oftener, perhaps, in France than in any other country.  France has the reputation of being the country of bad money.  The reputation is, I believe, exaggerated, though I have known a Boulogne tram conductor to refuse even a 50-centime piece as bad.  I remember vividly a warning given to me on this subject during my first visit to France.  I was sitting with a friend in an estaminet in a small village in the north of France, when an English chauffeur insinuated himself into the conversation.  He was eager to give us advice about France and the French.  “I like the French,” he said, “but you can’t trust them.  Look out for bad money.  They’re terrors for bad money.  I’d have been done oftener myself, only that luckily I married a Frenchwoman.  She’s in the ticket office at the Maison des Delits—­you probably know the name—­it’s a dancing-hall in Montmartre.  Any time I get a bad 5 franc piece, I pass it on to her, and she gets rid of it in the change to some Froggie.  My God, they are dishonest!  I wouldn’t say a word against the French, but just that one thing.  They’re dishonest—­damned dishonest.”  He sat back on the bench, a figure of insular rectitude but of cosmopolitan broadmindedness.  Is it not the perfect compromise?

XXIII

THE MORALS OF BEANS

“Nine bean-rows will I have there,” cries Mr Yeats in describing his Utopia in The Lake Isle of Innisfree.  I have only two.  They run east to west between the second-early potatoes and the red-currant bushes.  They are broad beans.  They are in flower just now, and every flower is a little black-and-white butterfly.  That, however, is the good side of the account.  If you look closer at them, you will see that each of them appears as if its head had been dipped into coal-dust.