Ned’s journey to the capital was, indeed, a race a little perilous and full of excitement. The common spirit, or suggestion, of suppressed effervescence that had been his former experience, was revealed now a spouting, tingling fountain, light yet heady, hissing with froth and bubbles. The kennels of France ran, as it were, with sparkling wine, and the very mayfly of moral intoxication was hatched from them in swarms. Thoughts, words, acts; the habits of dress, of motion, of regard--all were the characteristics of an hysteria the result of unaccustomed indulgence--the result of reckless drinking at the released spring. One could never know if a chance expression--either of speech or feature--would procure one a madly laughing or a madly resentful acknowledgment. Exultation and terror walked arm-in-arm by the ways, each trying stealthily to trip up the other. It was an insane land, and now verging on a paroxysm of mania; for it was known that at last the king--the man of shifty vision--was focussing his eyesight on the north-eastern border of his kingdom, whence loomed the shadow of foreign legions moving to his aid. The north-eastern border! To enter the land of fury from such a direction was to invite one’s own destruction. Not even luck, recklessness, and unexceptionable passports might, perhaps, have saved Ned from the homicidal madness of a people wrought to fantastic fear, had it not been for a quick-witted post-boy’s genius in availing himself of the right occasions to apply them. This was his real good-fortune--that his own innate charm of manner, his patience and sweetness, his characteristic unaffectedness in the matter of his rank, and his healing sense of humour in everything, found their response in the heart of the garrulous Jacques, and converted that amiable horse-emmet from an indifferent employé into a very fraternal road-companion. So, through stress and danger, Ned sped on his journey, and--following for fifty leagues from the frontier in the track of the wrecking storm--was enabled to enter Paris, by the great Flanders road, some four days after his parting with M. le Comte de Lawoestine. Then--a final difficulty at the Temple barrier surmounted--he found himself once more a mean small condition of the life of that city to whose self-emancipatory throes he had once been a deeply concerned witness. And he accepted the fact without uneasiness, not knowing that before he should turn for the last time to quit the awful place of death and resurrection, the tragedy of his own life, in the midst of the thousands there enacting, should be consummated. CHAPTER IX.