Pleasant trees and pretty gardens are here on every side in plenty, but where are the houses of the gentlemen of France, and where are the French gentlemen themselves? This is a difference between France and England which cannot fail to "knock" the observant traveller (as Artemus Ward would say)--the notable absence of country seats during hours and hours of passage along the best routes; whereas in England the prospect from almost every hill of woodland would have a great house at the end of its vista, and the environs of every town would stretch into outworks of villas smiling in the sun. The French have ways and fashions which are not ours, but their nation is large enough to entitle them to a standard of their own, just as the Americans, with so great a people agreed on the matter, may surely claim liberty to speak with a twang, and to write of a "plow." I am convinced that it is a mistake to say we Britons are a silent people compared with the French or Americans. At some hundred sittings of the table d'hôte in both these countries I have found more of dull, dead silence than in England at our inns. An Englishman accustomed only to the pleasant chat of a domestic dinner feels ill at ease when dining with strangers, and so he notices their silence all the more; but the French table d'hôte (not in the big barrack hotels, for English tourists, we have before remarked upon) has as little general conversation, and an American one has far less than in England. Here in France come six or seven middle-class men to dine. They put the napkin kept for each from yesterday, and recognized by the knots they tied on it, up to their chins like the pinafore of a baby, and wipe plate, fork, and spoons with the other end, and eat bits and scraps of many dishes, and scrape their plates almost clean, and then depart, and not one word has been uttered.