It is a good place for rest and sleep and general recuperation of forces. The book of Doctor Wakefield says there is something about this atmosphere which is the deadly enemy of insomnia, and I think this must be true, for if I am any judge, this town is at times the noisiest one in Europe, and yet a body gets more sleep here than he would at home, I don’t care where his home is. Now, we are living at a most comfortable and satisfactory _pension_, with a garden of shade trees and flowers and shrubs, and a convincing air of quiet and repose. But just across the narrow street is the little market square, and at the corner of that is the church that is neighbor to the Roman arch, and that narrow street, and that billiard table of a market place, and that church are able, on a bet, to turn out more noise to a cubic yard at the wrong time than any other similar combination in the earth or out of it. In the street you have the skull-bursting thunder of the passing hack, a volume of sound not producible by six hacks anywhere else; on the hack is a lunatic with a whip which he cracks to notify the public to get out of his way. This crack is as keen and sharp and penetrating and ear-splitting as a pistol shot at close range, and the lunatic delivers it in volleys, not single shots. You think you will not be able to live till he gets by, and when he does get by he leaves only a vacancy for the bandit who sells _Le Petit Journal_ to fill with his strange and awful yell. He arrives with the early morning and the market people, and there is a dog that arrives at about the same time and barks steadily at nothing till he dies, and they fetch another dog just like him. The bark of this breed is the twin of the whip volley, and stabs like a knife. By and by, what is left of you the church bell gets. There are many bells, and apparently six or seven thousand town clocks, and as they are all five minutes apart--probably by law--there are no intervals. Some of them are striking all the time--at least, after you go to bed they are. There is one clock that strikes the hour and then strikes it over again to see if it was right. Then for evenings and Sundays there is a chime--a chime that starts in pleasantly and musically, then suddenly breaks into a frantic roar, and boom, and crash of warring sounds that makes you think Paris is up and the Revolution come again. And yet, as I have said, one sleeps here--sleeps like the dead. Once he gets his grip on his sleep, neither hack, nor whip, nor news fiend, nor dog, nor bell cyclone, nor all of them together, can wrench it loose or mar its deep and tranquil continuity. Yes, there is indeed something in this air that is death to insomnia.