Our little party had but few of the miseries here recounted to contend with.  My “savoir faire,” with all modesty be it spoken, has been long schooled in the art and practice of travelling; and while our less experienced fellow-travellers were deep in the novel mysteries of cotton stockings and petticoats, most ostentatiously displayed upon every table of the Bureau, we were comfortably seated in the handsome saloon of the Hotel du Nord, looking out upon a pretty grass plot, surrounded with orange trees, and displaying in the middle a jet d’eau about the size of a walking stick.

“Now, Mr. Lorrequer,” said Mrs. Bingham, as she seated herself by the open window, “never forget how totally dependent we are upon your kind offices.  Isabella has discovered already that the French of Mountjoy square, however intelligible in that neighbourhood, and even as far as Mount-street, is Coptic and Sanscrit here; and as for myself, I intend to affect deaf and dumbness till I reach Paris, where I hear every one can speak English a little.”

“Now, then, to begin my functions,” said I, as I rung for the waiter, and ran over in my mind rapidly how many invaluable hints for my new position my present trip might afford me, “always provided” (as the lawyers say,) that Lady Jane Callonby might feel herself tempted to become my travelling companion, in which case—­But, confound it, how I am castle-building again.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Bingham is looking as hungry and famished as though she would eat the waiter.  Ha! this is the “carte.”

“Allons faire petit souper.”

“Cotelettes d’Agneau.”

“Maionnaise d’homard.”

“Perdreaux rouges aux truffes—­mark that, aux truffes.”

“Gelee au maraschin.”

“And the wine, sir,” said the waiter, with a look of approval at my selection, “Champagne—­no other wine, sir?”

“No,” said I, “Champagne only.  Frappe de glace, of course,” I added, and the waiter departed with a bow that would have graced St. James’s.

As long as our immaterial and better part shall be doomed to keep company with its fleshy tabernacle, with all its attendant miseries of gout and indigestion, how much of our enjoyment in this world is dependent upon the mere accessory circumstances by which the business of life is carried on and maintained, and to despise which is neither good policy nor sound philosophy.  In this conclusion a somewhat long experience of the life of a traveller has fully established me.  And no where does it press more forcibly upon the mind than when first arrived in a continental inn, after leaving the best hotels of England still fresh in your memory.  I do not for a moment dispute the very great superiority in comfort of the latter, by which I would be understood to mean all those resemblances to one’s own home which an English hotel so eminently possesses, and every other one so markedly wants; but I mean that in contrivances to elevate the spirit, cheer the jaded and tired wayfarer