Whatever their previous tastes, men soon conform to the habits of a nation, and these arbitrary boundaries of the gentlemen of the red tape become like Nature’s own frontiers of flood or mountain. Not but it must have been somewhat puzzling in the good days of the Consulate and the Empire to trim one’s sails quick enough for the changes of the political hurricane. You were an Italian yesterday, you are a Frenchman to-day; you went to bed a Prussian, and you awoke a Dutchman. These were sore trials, and had they been pushed much further, must have led to the most strange misconceptions and mistakes. Now, with a word of apology for the digression, let me come back to the cause of it--and yet why should I make my excuses on this head? These ‘Loiterings’ of mine are as much in the wide field of dreamy thought as over the plains and valleys of the material world. I never promised to follow a regular track, nor did I set out on my journey bound, like a king’s messenger, to be at my destination in a given time. Not a bit of it. I ‘ll take ‘mine ease in mine inn.’ I’ll stay a week, a fortnight-- ay, a month, here, if I please it. You may not like the accommodation, nor wish to put up with a ‘settle and stewed parsnips.’ Be it so. Here we part company then. If you don’t like my way of travel, there’s the diligence, or, if you prefer it, take the extra post, and calculate, if you can, how to pay your postillion in kreutzers--invented by the devil, I believe, to make men swear--and for miles, that change with every little grand-duchy of three acres in extent. I wish you joy of your travelling companions--the German who smokes, and the Frenchman who frowns at you; the old _vrau_ who falls asleep on your shoulder, and the _bonne_ who gives you a baby to hold in your lap. But why have I put myself into this towering passion? Heaven knows it’s not my wont. And once more to go back, and find, if I can, what I was thinking of. I have it. This same digression of mine was _apropos_ to the scene I witnessed, as our breakfast concluded at the château.