5.  And as my journey is almost always in the springtime, the twisted spire of the cathedral usually shows itself against the first grey of dawn, as we run out again southwards:  and resolving to watch the sunrise, I fall more complacently asleep,—­and the sun is really up by the time one has to change carriages, and get morning coffee at Macon.  And from Amberieux, through the Jura valley, one is more or less feverishly happy and thankful, not so much for being in sight of Mont Blanc again, as in having got through the nasty and gloomy night journey; and then the sight of the Rhone and the Saleve seems only like a dream, presently to end in nothingness; till, covered with dust, and feeling as if one never should be fit for anything any more, one staggers down the hill to the Hotel des Bergues, and sees the dirtied Rhone, with its new iron bridge, and the smoke of a new factory exactly dividing the line of the aiguilles of Chamouni.

6.  That is the journey as it is now,—­and as, for me, it must be; except on foot, since there is now no other way of making it.  But this was the way we used to manage it in old days:—­

Very early in Continental transits we had found out that the family travelling carriage, taking much time and ingenuity to load, needing at the least three, usually four—­horses, and on Alpine passes six, not only jolted and lagged painfully on bad roads, but was liable in every way to more awkward discomfitures than lighter vehicles; getting itself jammed in archways, wrenched with damage out of ruts, and involved in volleys of justifiable reprobation among market stalls.  So when we knew better, my father and mother always had their own old-fashioned light two-horse carriage to themselves, and I had one made with any quantity of front and side pockets for books and picked up stones; and hung very low, with a fixed side-step, which I could get off or on with the horses at the trot; and at any rise or fall of the road, relieve them, and get my own walk, without troubling the driver to think of me.

7.  Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, when the Seine glittered gaily at Charenton, and the arbres de Judee were mere pyramids of purple bloom round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk among the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got early into Sens, for new lessons in its cathedral aisles, and the first saunter among the budding vines of the coteaux.  I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, for the ‘Seven Lamps,’ in the old inn at Sens, which Dickens has described in his wholly matchless way in the last chapter of ‘Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings’.  The next day brought us to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and we always spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon.  Monday, the drive of drives, through the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the vine-surrounded town of Dole; whence, behold at last the limitless ranges of Jura, south and north, beyond the woody plain, and above them the ‘Derniers Kochers’ and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew.  Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians.