We had a long quarter of an hour to wait before the _Douane_ could bring itself to give up its dead, and there was another quarter of an hour of driving through deserted and badly-lighted streets before we got to our hotel. We crossed a bridge that must have been half a mile long, we feigned to each other an interest in a half-seen gateway at the end of it, and our hearts were all the time groping in a certain hold-all, where lay a spirit-kettle, a teapot, and half a pound of English tea. The offensively urbane and wide-awake head waiter, with his clean-shaven face and foxy eyes, had some evident difficulty in repressing his scorn when he heard that he was to _faire monter_ to our room a little milk and hot water, but it mounted to our third floor for all that. It was a blow to find a skin on the top of the milk that showed it had once been boiled: we did not know then that French hotels considered milk in its raw, uncooked state to be as baneful as if it were water. Our room was large, and of a somewhat gloomy magnificence, with towering bed canopies, and darkly-gleaming mahogany; and as our one _bougie_--valued in the bill at a franc--contended with its surroundings, we felt like a chapter out of almost any of Scott’s novels--the chapter where the hero spends a night in some one’s private and luxurious dungeon, and having obtained writing materials, has heard the last retreating footsteps of an attendant who has unostentatiously locked and double-locked the door. What we heard principally, while we drank our surreptitious midnight cup of tea, was not the howling of the storm or the hoarse baying of a bloodhound in the courtyard, but the snoring of some one in the next room. It was hard to believe that the artist was not doing it on purpose; each snore was so painstaking, so measured, and had such a careful crescendo in its vibrating fortissimo. He had certainly brought the accomplishment to a high degree of perfection, and if he does not die of concussion of the brain in the attempt, he ought, with a little more practice, to be able to empty any hotel in a single night. It was broad summer in Bordeaux, so we discovered next morning when we escaped from the [Illustration: OUR SURREPTITIOUS MIDNIGHT CUP OF TEA.]