At length _ennui_ got the better of the good air and the invigorating water, and I sent for my passport and the horses. François, by this time, was tired of cooking, and he carried the orders for both right joyfully, while my _bourgeois_ received his Napoleons with many handsome expressions of regret, that I dare say were truer than common. In the mean time we hurried about with our cards of P.P.C.; bidding adieu to some, without the slightest expectation of ever meeting them again, and promising others to renew the acquaintance on the Rhine, or among the Alps, as events might decide. At half-past eleven all was ready, and shaking hands with two countrymen who came to see us off, we took our places, and dashed away from our _ménage_ of a fortnight's duration, as unceremoniously as we had stepped into it. The dog-star raged with all its fury, as we drove through the close and pent-up valleys that lie between Spa and Verviers. At the latter place we began to ascend, until finally we reached a broad and naked height, that overlooked a wide reach of country towards the east. This was the region that lies around the ancient capital of Charlemagne, and is now a part of what M. de Pradt has described "as a façade thrown before Europe," or the modern and disjointed kingdom of Prussia. We reached the frontier on the height of land, where, everything proving to be _en règle_, we met with no obstruction or delay. While crossing the swell of land just mentioned, the wind changed with a suddenness that we are apt to think American, but which occurs more frequently in this hemisphere, or rather in this part of it, than in our own. The peculiarity of the American climate is its exaggeration rather than its fickleness; its passages from extreme heat to extreme cold, more than the frequency of its lesser transitions. One never thinks of an umbrella in America, with a cloudless sky; whereas, during the spring months in particular, there is no security against rain an hour at a time, near the western coast of Europe, more especially north of the Bay of Biscay. On the present occasion, we passed in a few minutes from the oven to the ice-house, and were travelling with cloaks about us, and closed windows, long before we reached Aix-la-Chapelle, at which ancient town we arrived about six. Unlike Spa, where we had the choice among a hundred furnished houses, Aix was so crowded that we got narrow lodgings, with great difficulty, in a second-rate hotel.