All minor disasters of the journey overcome, the travellers reached Paris in safety. So far, Mr. Dundyke had found no occasion to rub on with his "we" and "no," for he encountered very few people who were not able to speak, or at least understand, a little English. But when they quitted Paris--and they remained in it but two days--then their difficulties commenced; and many were the distresses, and furious the fits of anger, of the common-councilman. It pleased Mr. Dundyke to travel by diligence on cross-country roads, rather than take the rail to Lyons--of which rail, and of all rails, he had a sort of superstitious dread--but this he found easy to do, though it caused him to be somewhat longer on the road. Here his tongue was at fault. He wanted to know the names of the towns and villages they passed through, the meaning of any puzzling object of wonder he saw on his way, and he could not ask; or, rather, he did ask repeatedly, but the answers conveyed to his ears only an unmeaning sound. It vexed him excessively. "I don't think they understand you, David," Mrs. Dundyke said to him one day. "And how should they understand, speaking nothing but heathen gibberish?" he returned. "It's enough to make a saint swear." Another source of annoyance was the living. Those who have travelled by diligence in the more remote parts of France, and sat down to the tables-d'hôte at the road-side inns where the diligence halted, and remember the scrambling haste observed, may imagine the distresses of Mr. and Mrs. Dundyke. In common with their countrymen in general, they partook strongly of the national horror of frog-eating, and also of the national conviction that that delicate animal furnished the component parts of at least every second dish served up in France: so that it was little short of martyrdom to be planted down to a dinner, where half the dishes, for all the information they gave to the eye, might be composed of frogs, or something equally obnoxious. There would be the bouilli first, but Mr. Dundyke, try as he would, could not swallow it, although he had once dined on red-herrings; and there would be a couple of skinny chickens, drying on a dish of watercress, but before _he_ could hope, in his English deliberation, to get at them, they were snapped up and devoured. Few men liked good living better than David Dundyke,--how else would he have been fit to become one of the renowned metropolitan body-corporate?--and when it was to be had at anybody else's cost, none enjoyed it more. At these tables-d'hôte, eat or not eat, he had to pay, and bitter and frequent were the heartburnings at throwing away his good money, yet rising up with an empty stomach. Not a tenth part of the cravings of hunger did he and his wife ever satisfy at these miserable tables-d'hôte. The very idea of but the minutest portion of a frog's leg going into their mouths, was more repulsive to their minds than that