By way of Fumay--a little pretty town situate on a river holm, and overhung by a group of stately rocks called the Ladies of the Meuse--Ned, adopting the advice of the Comte de Lawoestine, entered France. At once--as if, from easy gliding down a stream, he had been drawn into and was rushing forward in the midst of rapids--his days became mere records of anxiety and turbulence that constantly intensified throughout every league of his approach towards Paris. At the very frontier, indeed, he had taken the plunge, as exemplified in his change of postilions. To the last village on the German side he had been driven by a taciturn barbarian--a cheese-featured Westphalian, picturesque, malodorous, and imperturbably uncivil. This certificated lout was dressed in a yellow jacket, having black cuffs and cape, and carried a saffron sash about his waist and a little bugle horn slung over his shoulder--the whole signifying the imperial livery of the road, then as sacred from assault as is the uniform of a modern soldier of the Fatherland. Tobacco, _trinkgeld_, and the unalienable right to keep his parts of speech locked up in the beer-cellar of his stomach--these appeared to be the three conditions of his service. Ned parted from him with a league-long-elaborated anathema that sounded as ineffective in the delivery as the rap of a knuckle on a full hogshead, and so, on the farther side of the border, committed himself to a first experience of the “patriot” postboy. From the smooth and muddy into the broken water! Here was volubility proportionate with the other’s gross reticence. Jacques was no less picturesque and malodorous than was Hans. He had his private atmosphere, like the German; only it was eloquent of pipes and garlic rather than of pipes and beer. He spat and gabbled all day; and he was dressed, like a stage pirate, in a short brown coat with brass buttons, and in striped pink and white pantaloons tucked into half-boots. A sash went round his waist also, and he wore on his head a scarlet cap having a cockade. Ned was feverishly interested in this his first introduction to a child of the new liberty; but he would fain have found him inclined to a lesser verbosity. However, he was a cheerful rascal and a good-humoured, and his easy sangfroid helped the traveller out of an occasional tangle of the red-tapeism that he found immeshing official processes rather more intricately under a republican than under an autocratic form of government.