Our travellers, three in number, and evidently portrayed from the life, have just descended ("A Tour in Foreign Parts") from the two-horse chaise, which the postilion is driving into the yard. The smallest of the three Englishmen, with "Chesterfield's Letters" under his arm, approaches the obsequious host of the "Poste Royale" with a conciliatory smile; the while the landlady is engaged in an assault upon her hen-roost, and the servant-girl seems to aim at a similar result with the domestic cats. And now ("La Cuisine de la Poste") we are introduced to the interior. The _pot-au-feu_ hangs in the great chimney over the blazing logs; the village gossips are there--the postilion in his clumsy jack-boots, the housewife, and the cure with a friend sipping his glass of red wine--and on the walls _Louis le bien-aime_, with baton and perruque, is balanced by _Sanctus Paulus_, with a sword much bigger than himself, or by the "Ordonnances de Monsieur le Duc de Choiseul, Grand Maitre des Postes et Relais de France." Or, again, our travellers have arrived at last in the great city ("Englishman at Paris"), and take their walk in the streets of _La Ville Lumiere_. A fat monk and a thin peasant seem both to regard our tourist with astonishment; a dandy of the period is driving his chariot with a lackey hanging on behind, and the indispensable _perruquier_ is hurrying to an appointment. Or--in its way most curious of all--we see the Pont Neuf of those old days, with the costumes and characters which then thronged its thoroughfare. Huge muffs seem to have been then the fashion, often combined in use with umbrellas, such as we now should call Japanese sunshades; the _perruquier_ here, too, must have his muff, though both hands are filled with the shaving-pot and curling tongs; the trim abbe in his short cassock, even the truculent-looking postilion are all provided. In the corner a poodle is being clipped, just as we may see to-day beside the Seine, and is loudly vociferating his complaints; and, above all, we see the quaint ensign of the trade, which combined the shoeblack's lower art with that of the dog-barber. _Aux Quarante Lions St. Louis Decrotte a l'Anglaise et Tond des Chiens Proprement Allons, Messeigneurs, Allons._