Eleven hours in a train is an immeasurable time, especially when the train goes through a country that, after a first hour or so of picturesqueness, lacks absolutely any distinction of colour or outline. Greyish tilled plains stretched away on either side, without a fence, without a boundary, except for the occasional rows of housemaids’ mops and birch-rods that enlivened the horizon. These detachments of poplars are inseparable from French travelling; they haunt the ridges of the plains like the ghosts of worthier trees, with all the dejection befitting those who know that they are only worth a few francs, and can hope for no better transmigration than a kitchen table or a pig’s trough. The country seemed silent and empty after the harvest; we saw very few living things except flocks of sheep, and we meditated with an ever-growing wonder on what might be the moral suasion that kept each of these on its own undefended square of grass. Arguing from the more than demoniacal perverseness of Irish sheep in breaking bounds, it seemed to us that the French must have hit on the supreme expedient of offering no resistance whatever, and thereby destroyed at one blow the essential joy of trespass. The train progressed in an easy canter, giving us time to observe all wayside objects: we could have counted the big _citrouilles_ that lay in magnificent obesity, with their sunset-hued cheeks glowing like fire on the colourless fields, suggestive of immeasurable pumpkin squash, and we could see on the low bushes that we had at first taken for currant trees, the black clusters that told we had at last come into the wine country. It was not so pleasant to see in the waiting-room at Poitiers the black clusters of men, each enveloped in his own halo of garlic or bad tobacco smoke, that told us our chance of getting a cup of coffee was not worth the attendant horror of elbowing our way through them to the buffet. We had not got over the strangeness of knowing that at any or every small hotel or railway station we could have a really good cup of coffee, unflavoured by chicory, liquorice, blackbeetles, or whatever may be the master ingredient in the muddy draught that is invariable at such places in England, and we had looked forward to Poitiers with an enthusiasm quite unconnected with the Black Prince, or any other romantic memory of Mrs. Markham’s _History of England_.