2.40 P.M.--Made for a village on the right bank with all speed--Port de Groslee. Remains of Roman aqueduct on hilltop back of village. Rain!--Deluges of it. Took refuge in an inn on the bank--Hôtel des Voyageurs. The public room was full of voyageurs and tobacco smoke. The voyageurs may have been river folk in the old times when the inn was built, but this present crowd was made up of teamsters. They sat at bare tables, under their feet was the bare floor, about them were the four bare walls--a dreary place at any time, a heart-breaking place now in the dark of the downpour. However, it was manifestly not dreary to the teamsters. They were sipping red wine and smoking; they all talked at once, and with great energy and spirit, and every now and then they gave their thighs a sounding slap and burst into a general horse laugh. The courier said that this was in response to rude wit and coarse anecdotes. The brace of modest-looking girls who were waiting on the teamsters did not seem troubled. The courier said that they were used to all kinds of language and were not defiled by it; that they had probably seldom heard a spade called anything but a spade, therefore the foulest words came innocent to their ears. This inn was built of stone--of course; everybody’s house on the Continent, from palace to hovel, is built of that dismal material, and as a rule it is as square as a box and odiously plain and destitute of ornament; it is formal, forbidding, and breeds melancholy thoughts in people used to friendlier and more perishable materials of construction. The frame house and the log house molder and pass away, even in the builder’s time, and this makes a proper bond of sympathy and fellowship between the man and his home; but the stone house remains always the same to the person born in it; in his old age it is still as hard, and indifferent, and unaffected by time as it was in the long-vanished days of his childhood. The other kind of house shows by many touching signs that it has noted his griefs and misfortunes and has felt for them, but the stone house doesn’t--it is not of his evanescent race, it has no kinship with him, nor any interest in him.