If the face be an index to the mind, that Alsatian must have passed through a mental cyclone. Luckily for the angel who records bad language, his rage was so terrible that he lost the power of speech, the while I gently moved my head to and fro, and gazed at him with compassionate remonstrance, as much as to say how could he, a sausage-eating creature, have had the heart to pass himself off on me as a Frenchman? It was cruel, but it was merited. That Alsatian I despised as the meanest thing in patriotism I had ever met--and my experience of the article is not limited--for even were I a German, so long as I behaved myself with propriety he had no right to insult me by his surly cross-examination. But I suppose the poor devil thought he was playing the rôle of redresser of the wrongs of his country, and exacting an instalment of that _revanche_ of which we hear occasional frothing babble. If I were a German I should be proud of it, and I hope I should have had the firmness to tell my Alsatian interlocutor so to his teeth. From Bordeaux to Bayonne, down through the Landes, is a most interesting ride, as I dimly recollect; but I have no notes of it, and I infer that nothing particular occurred as I sped through the fat, nice, pleasant country. I had a short stay at Bayonne--long enough, however, to enable me to mark by ethnological signs and tinge of complexion that Spain was near. There were architectural signs, too, for there were colonnades in some of the streets to shelter promenaders from the powerful sun. Plenty of soldiers in Bayonne, and plenty of Hebrews. All of the latter seem to be engaged in the money-changing business. The whole art of money-changing consists in undervaluing the coin you are buying, and setting an exaggerated value on that you are giving for it. I must have lost a small fortune in the course of my money-changing transactions, therefore am I a most determined adherent of a uniform system of coinage for all civilized nations; and that coinage, I maintain, should be decimal. Fancy a foreigner getting small money for a sovereign after he has incurred a debt of one and sixpence for a hot salt-water bath on the South Coast! The fair attendant offers him a crown-piece, two half-crowns, two florins, two shillings, two six-pences, two groats, two threepenny bits, a postage stamp, a wheedling simper and a charity-bob. He is puzzled, and to my thinking he is justified in being puzzled; and if the attendant be not exceedingly attractive he is cheated. Coinage should be simple--should be so plain in identity that a child could distinguish it in the dark, and its worth should descend in regulated gradation. This reform will come eventually. One of the objections to a universal mintage may be that there would be a struggle as to whose profile should be sunk into the stamps--a point on which many rulers are solicitous, for they foresee that it is the only species of immortality they will ever attain.