your life!’ Those Frenchmen don’t mind it because it only repeats what they’re always saying themselves, but if you’re a foreigner it gets on your nerves.  That city is too uniformly fine to be of much use to me—­it keeps me all the time wondering why I’m not in one eternal good humour to match.  There’s good old London now—­always looks, I should think, just as you feel.  Looks like history, too, and change, and contrast, and the different varieties of the human lot.”

“I see what you mean, poppa,” I said.  “There’s too much equality in Paris, isn’t there—­to be interesting,” but the Senator was too deeply engaged in getting out momma’s smelling salts to corroborate this interpretation.

It is a very long way to Genoa if you don’t stop at Aix-les-Bains or anywhere—­twenty-four hours—­but Mont Cenis occurs in the night, which is suitable in a tunnel.  There came a chill through the darkness that struck to one’s very marrow, and we all rose with one accord and groped about for more rugs.  When broad daylight came it was Savoy, and we realised what we had been through.  The Senator was inclined to deplore missing the realisation of the Mont Cenis, and it was only when momma said it was a pity he hadn’t taken a train that would have brought us through in the daytime and enabled him to examine it, that he ceased to express regret.  My parents are often vehicles of philosophy for each other.

Besides, in the course of the morning the Senator acknowledged that he got more tunnels than he had any idea he had paid for.  They came with a precipitancy that interfered immensely with any connected idea of the scenery, though momma, in my interest, did her best to form one.  “Note, my love,” she said, as we began to penetrate the frontier country, “that majestic blue summit on the horizon to the left”—­obliteration, and another tunnel! “Don’t miss that jagged line of snows just beyond the back of poppa’s head, dear one.  Quick! they are melting away!”—­but the next tunnel was quicker.  “Put down that the dazzling purity of these lovely peaks must be realised, for it cannot be”—­darkness, and the blight of another tunnel.  It was very hard on momma’s imagination, and she finally accepted the Senator’s warning that it would be thrown completely out of gear if she went on, and abandoned the attempt to form complete sentences between tunnels.  It was much simpler to exclaim “Splendid!” or “Glorious!” which one could generally do without being interrupted.

We were not prepared to enjoy anything when we arrived at Genoa, but there was Christopher Columbus in bronze, just outside the station in a little place by himself, and we felt bound to give him our attention before we went any further.  He was patting America on the head, both of them life size, and carrying on that historical argument with his sailors in bas-relief below; and he looked a very fine character.  As poppa said, he was just the man you would pick out