In the afternoon the relics of the monk were borne through the streets by a procession of some thousand women and a few men. These ladies, some hundreds of whom were dressed in white muslin, and in two single ranks, chanted as they slowly marched, and all the bystanders took off their hats, but I really could not see what adoration was due to the mouldering bones of a withered friar, so my excellent straw hat was kept on my head. But the French, who live in public, must have a public religion, a gregarious worship, with demonstrative action and colours and sounds. Deep devotion, silent in its depth, is for the north and not for this radiant sun, though you will find that quiet worship again in lower latitudes where the very heat precludes activity. Some twenty years ago, one of the ablest men of the University of Cambridge read a paper on the influence which the insular position and the climate of Britain has upon our national character, and it appeared to be proved clearly that this influence pervades every feature of our life. In a third-rate French town like Nancy, nearly all the pleasant _agrements_ depend on the climate, and would be sadly curtailed by rain or snow. So, again, when a Frenchman visits England and gets laughed at for mistakes in our difficult language, and has to eat only two dishes for dinner, and drinks bad coffee, and has no evening lounge in the open air, and is then told to look at our domestic life, and finds he cannot get an entrance there (for how very few French do enter there), his miseries are directly caused by our climate, and no wonder his impression of Albion is that we are all fog and cotton and smoke, and everything _triste_. From Nancy we sent the canoe by rail to meet me on the river Marne, and while the slow luggage-train lumbered along I took the opportunity of visiting the celebrated Camp of Châlons, the Aldershot of France. An omnibus takes you from the railway station, and you soon enter a long straggling street of very little houses, built badly, and looking as if one and all could be pushed down by your hand. These are not the military quarters, but the self-grown parasite sutlers' town, which springs up near every camp. Here is "Place Solferino," and there "Rue Malakhoff," where the sign of the inn is a Chinaman having his pigtail lopped off by a Français. The camp is in the middle of a very large plain, with plenty of dust and white earth, which "glared" on my eyes intensely, this being the hottest day I have experienced during the vacation. But there are trees for shade, and a good deal of grass on these extensive downs where great armies can manoeuvre and march past the Emperor as he sits enthroned under a bower on that hill-crest overlooking all.