elevation, except in the air of sterility that reigned around. It really seemed as if the river, so notoriously affluent in mud, had taken down with it all the soil. LETTER XXVIII. Miserable Inn.--A French Bed.--Free-Trade.--French Relics.--Cross Roads.--Arrival at La Grange.--Reception by General Lafayette.--The Nullification Strife.--Conversation with Lafayette.--His Opinion as to a Separation of the Union in America.--The Slave Question.--Stability of the Union.--Style of living at La Grange.--Pap.--French Manners, and the French Cuisine.--Departure from La Grange.--Return to Paris. Dear ----, I have little to say of the next two days' drive, except that ignorance, and the poetical conceptions of a postilion, led us into the scrape of passing a night in just the lowest inn we had entered in Europe. We pushed on after dark to reach this spot, and it was too late to proceed, as all of the party were excessively fatigued. To be frank with you, it was an _auberge aux charretiers_. Eating was nearly out of the question; and yet I had faith to the last, in a French bed. The experience of this night, however, enables me to say all France does not repose on excellent wool mattresses, for we were obliged to put up with a good deal of straw. And yet the people were assiduous, anxious to please, and civil. The beds, moreover, were tidy; our straw being clean straw. The next night we reached a small town, where we did much better. Still one can see the great improvements that travellers are introducing into France, by comparing the taverns on the better roads with those on the more retired routes. At this place we slept well, and _à la Française_. If Sancho blessed the man who invented sleep after a nap on Spanish earth, what would he have thought of it after one enjoyed on a French bed! The drums beat through the streets after breakfast, and the population crowded their doors, listening, with manifest interest, to the proclamation of the crier. The price of bread was reduced; an annunciation of great interest at all times, in a country where bread is literally the staff of life. The advocates of free-trade prices ought to be told that France would often be convulsed, literally from want, if this important interest were left to the sole management of dealers. A theory will not feed a starving multitude, and hunger plays the deuce with argument. In short, free-trade, as its warmest votaries now carry out their doctrines, approaches suspiciously near a state of nature: a condition which might do well enough, if trade were a principal, instead of a mere incident of life. With some men, however, it is a principal--an all in all--and this is the reason we frequently find those who are notoriously the advocates of exclusion and privileges in government, maintaining the doctrine, as warmly as those who carry their liberalism, in other matters, to extremes.