So his complaints went on, for there never was a man who got so much out of small miseries.  Skenedonk and I must have failed to see all in our travels that he put before us.  For we were full of enjoyment and wonder:  at the country people, wooden shod, the women’s caps and long cloaks; at the quiet fair roads which multiplied themselves until we often paused enchanted in a fairy world of sameness; at market-towns, where fountains in the squares were often older than America, the country out of which we arrived.

Skenedonk heard without shifting a muscle all Doctor Chantry’s grievances; and I told him we ought to cherish them, for they were views of life we could not take ourselves.  Few people are made so delicately that they lose color and rail at the sight of raw tripe brought in by a proud hostess to show her resources for dinner; or at a chicken coming upon the table with its head tucked beneath its wing.

“We are fed with poulet, poulet, nothing but poulet,” said Doctor Chantry, “until the poulets themselves are ashamed to look us in the face!”

We fared well, indeed, and the wine was good, and my master said he must sustain himself on it though it proved his death.  He could not march as Skenedonk and I regularly marched.  We hired a cart to lift him and our knapsacks from village to village, with a driver who knew the road to Paris.  When the distances were long we sometimes mounted beside him.  I noticed that the soil of this country had not the chalk look of other lands which I afterwards saw to the east and north; but Napoleon was already making good the ancient thoroughfares.

When my master was on shipboard he enjoyed the sea even less than the free air of these broad stretches; for while he could cast an eye about and approve of something under the sky—­perhaps a church steeple, or the color of a thatch which filled me with joy—­he could not approve of anything aboard a ship.  Indeed, it was pity to have no delight in cleaving the water, and in the far-off spouting of whales, to say nothing of a living world that rides in undulations.  For my part, I loved even the creaking of a ship, and the uncertainty of ever coming to port, and the anxiety lest a black flag should show above every sail we passed.  The slow progress of man from point to point in his experience, while it sometimes enrages, on the whole interests me; and the monotony of a voyage has a sweetness like the monotony of daily bread.  I looked out of the grenier window upon the high road, and upon the June sun in the act of setting; for we had supped and gone early to rest after a hard day.  Post horses were stamping underneath, all ready for some noble count who intended to make another stage of his journey before nightfall.

Small obtrusive cares, such as the desire that my shoes should last well into Paris, mingled with joy in the smell of the earth at sunset, and the looking forward to seeing Madame de Ferrier again.  I wrapped myself every night in the conviction that I should see her, and more freely than I had ever seen her in America.