I know not how it happened--perhaps it was fatigue--possibly a dose of claret, which caused me to fall asleep in the cuppy[1] soon after I had passed the barriers of Calais. Be this as it may, while I was dreaming of home, there was a sudden stop, which aroused me. I could have sworn at the moment that I was upon a dreary part of the road between Wexford and Dungarvan; for, besides the general features of the locality, I saw on the door of a very Irish-like looking public-house, these words--“John Cullen sells beer and brandy.” “Where am I?” said I to myself; “surely not in France.” The matter was explained to me. There are several hundred families of English manufacturers, principally from Nottingham, employed at their trade in Calais and its vicinity; and John Cullen, who says he is a Yorkshireman, and has certainly been for more than twenty years established where he now is, and has married a Frenchwoman, finds it his interest to brew good beer, and to keep a public-house for the entertainment of his neighbours and the operatives of Calais, although the town is three miles distant. But at the moment I was fully impressed with the notion that John Cullen and his house were in the barony of Bargy, or in that of Forth. As the horses at this place were not disposed to run away with the diligence, and the conductor had no indisposition to a glass of brandy, I contrived to enter John Cullen’s house, which certainly has nothing English about it, and asked for the landlord, who soon appeared--an apparently thoroughbred Irishman, and with a fry of half-bred youngsters at his heels, speaking the oddest jargon that ever man heard. At first I hoped that it might have been the old dialect of the barony of Forth, but I was grievously disappointed. Though John Cullen brews very good beer, which he sends regularly into Calais, and sells very fair brandy, it would be no harm, from what I could learn, if Father Mathew could spare time to make a morning visit to his neighbourhood. The greater part of the way from Calais to Boulogne is bleak, open, and ill drained, and altogether more of a snipe-shooting country than a farmer would desire to see, with a good deal of wheat, however, here and there, but not in the regularly formed ridges which I had seen in England. We reached Boulogne that night, and fixed ourselves quietly in an English kind of hotel, after having been well tormented, before we were fairly housed, by emissaries from half a dozen establishments, pressing us in French, English, and German, to patronise their respective employers. We started at five o’clock the next morning from a coach-office very like one of our own in its arrangement of desks, clerks, way-bills, and weighing machines.