This she had answered after glancing at my puny package and travel-worn dress, but her ideas about the guest were enlarged when she heard of how he had come, and so she managed (they always do if you give time and smiles and show sketches) to allot me a nice little room to myself, with two beds of the hugest size, a water-jug of the most minute dimensions, and sheets very coarse and very clean. Another omelette was consumed while the customary visitors surrounded the benighted traveller; carters, porters, all of them with courteous manners, and behaving so well to me and to one another, and talking such good sense, as to make me feel how different from this is the noisy taproom of a roadside English "public." Presently two fine fellows of the Gendarmerie came in for their half bottle of wine, at one penny, and as both of them had been in the Crimea there was soon ample subject for most interesting conversation. This was conducted in French, but the people here usually speak a patois utterly impossible for one to comprehend. I found they were discussing me under various conjectures, and they settled at last that I must be rather an odd fish, but certainly "a gentleman," and probably "noble." They were most surprised to hear I meant to stop all the next day at Illfurth, simply because it was Sunday, but they did not fail to ask for my passport, which until this had been carried all the way without a single inquiry on the subject. The sudden change from a first-rate hotel this morning to the roadside inn at Illfurth, was more entertaining on account of its variety than for its agreeables; but in good health and good weather one can put up with anything. The utter silence of peaceful and cool night in a place like this reigns undisturbed until about four o'clock in early morn, when the first sound is some matutinal cock, who crows first because he is proud of being first awake. After he has asserted his priority thus once or twice, another deeper toned rooster replies, and presently a dozen cocks are all in full song, and in different keys. In half an hour you hear a man's voice; next, some feminine voluble remarks; then a latch is moved and clicks, the dog gives a morning bark, and a horse stamps his foot in the stable because the flies have aroused to breakfast on his tender skin. At length a pig grunts, his gastric juice is fairly awake, the day is begun. And so the stream of life, thawed from its sleep, flows gently on again, and at length the full tide of village business is soon in agitation, with men's faces and women's quite as full of import as if this French Stoke Pogis were the capital of the world.