fitting place, and endeavour to make the best of it. The pedestrian alone, of all travellers, is thus taken by the hand by Fortune. Your extra post, with a courier on the box, interferes sadly with the current of all those little incidents of the road which are ever happening to him who takes to the ‘byways’ of the world. The odds are about one hundred to one against you that, when seated in your carriage, the postillion in his saddle and the fat courier outside, the words _en route_ being given, you arrive at your destination that evening, without any accident or adventure whatever of more consequence than a lost shoe from the near leader, a snapped spring, or a heartburn from the glass of bad brandy you took at the third stage. A blue post with white stripes on it tells you that you are in Prussia; or a yellow- and-brown pole, that the Grand-Duke of Nassau is giving you the hospitality of his territory--save which you have no other evidence of change. The village inn, and its little circle of celebrities, opens not to _you_ those peeps at humble life so indicative of national character: _you_ stop not at the wayside chapel in the sultry heat of noon to charm away your peaceful hour of reflection, now turning from the lovely Madonna above the altar to the peasant girl who kneels in supplication beneath, now contrasting the stern features of some painted martyr with the wrinkled front and weather-beaten traits of some white-haired beggar, now musing over the quiet existence of the humble figure whose heavy sabots wake the echoes of the vaulted aisle, or watching, perhaps, that venerable priest who glides about before the altar in his white robes, and disappears by some unseen door, seeming like a phantom of the place. The little relics of village devotion, so touching in their poverty, awake no thought within _you_ of the pious souls in yonder hamlet. The old curé himself, as he jogs along on his ambling pony, suggests nothing save the figure of age and decrepitude. _You_ have not seen the sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks of his humble flock, who salute him as he passes, nor gazed upon that broad high forehead, where benevolence and charity have fixed their dwelling. The foot-sore veteran or the young conscript have not been your fellow-travellers; mayhap you would despise them. Their joys and sorrows, their hopes, their fears, their wishes, all move in a humble sphere, and little suit the ears of those whose fortune is a higher one.