In walked a burly-looking customer, who ordered a glass of brandy for himself, and another for the landlord Nicole. Immediately afterwards--and this was a daily practice with old Nicole--a game of cards was proposed, which terminated in favour of the customer, who walked off scot free. In several instances the old man played in this way--double or quits with his customers--for the amount of coffee, wine, cider, or brandy, consumed in his company (he himself copiously partaking of all), and no one seemed without some play for it, to pay for what he had ordered. At several tables there were many parties playing in this way at different rates; and certainly if some of them had seen the contortions of their faces in a mirror, they would have been disgusted with a vice which so agitates the human frame, and unfits for every wise and rational pursuit. Having only played “spoil-five” and “five-and-forty” in my youth, I neither understood nor wished to learn the game which was played around me. My young friend and I went to our hotel, and there found the chambermaid and the waiter, while they were awaiting our arrival, playing ecarté together on the dinner table for the amount of their morning’s gratuities. “Twelve cakes for a halfpenny!” said I to myself again. It only remains for me to tell how I got back to England. I had reached Havre, by the beautiful Seine from Rouen, in the evening, without any particular adventure, and gone to an hotel kept by an Englishman, just as a waiter was cursing an unlucky boy, who had broken a wine-glass, in true English style. I heartily regretted that I had not gone to a French house, in which, if the waiter had cursed for a month in his own language, I should not have understood him. An accident had happened to the regular steamer for London, and there appeared no chance of my getting off for three days; I was in despair, especially as my horses had preceded me from another port, and I wished to be in Liverpool contemporaneously with their arrival there. In the course of the night I was informed that a steam-vessel had just arrived in Havre from Gibraltar, with some of the Braganza family on their way to Paris, and that she was going on to London at day-break. I tucked up my portmanteau under my arm, and my young friend and I sallied out to the part of the quay where the steamer lay, in profound darkness and the most perfect silence. “Qui vive?” said a watchman, as he put his lantern to my face and a hand upon my throat, while I was advancing to the gangboard. My companion explained; and as I had the prudence to give a franc to the watchman, he lighted us carefully to the side of the vessel.