By the time we reached Angoulême it was quite dark, and we had fallen into the sodden stupefaction of travel. The carriage was nearly empty, and the lamp cast a distorted light upon the puckered faces of the old lady and gentleman who were our only fellow-travellers, as their heads nodded and rolled in anxious, uneasy slumber. The small stations became more frequent, and we were drearily aware of the same routine at each: the half-dozen lights of a village across the fields, the nasal bellow of an unintelligible name, the thump of a box or two on the platform, and finally a sound that we took at first for the bleat of a tethered kid, but which we discovered to be the note of a small trumpet or horn, wound by the guard as the signal for departure. It was only towards the end of the journey that this implement had replaced the ordinary whistle, and for about eight or ten stations we laughed at it; after that the lament of the kid added itself seriously to the general gloom. The last hour or two before Bordeaux would have been much harder to bear but for a display of sheet lightning, the like of which we had never seen before. The sudden beautiful flicker played hide-and-seek like a living creature among the curtains of cloud, flashing about all the points of the compass between south and east, or sometimes thrusting to and fro across an opening, like glimpses of the rapiers in a giants’ fencing bout. It was under this mocking, elfish light that we first sighted Bordeaux and its river, and realised that the time had come for us to strap up our rugs, and say ‘pardon’ in our best French accent to the old gentleman on whose feet we trod as we did so, and to drag our stiff bodies forth into the electric glare of the station. We had reached such a stage of fatigue and demoralisation that we should rather have stayed in the carriage all night, and gone on with the old lady to a place she called ‘Erin,’ in a fine Hammersmith twang. We should not have cared much whether it proved to be the land of our birth, or Irun, on the Spanish frontier, which we now believe to have been her destination.