When we reached Altkirch, the frontier stage, a gendarme appeared and asked for my passport. On seeing my name, he told me that he had served in the Spanish Campaign, in 1823, under my nephew Christian, a captain in the Dragoons of the Guard. Between Altkirch and Saint-Louis, I met a rector and his parishioners; they were making a procession against the cock-chafers, nasty insects much multiplied since the Days of July. At Saint-Louis, the officers of the custom-house, who knew me, let me pass. I arrived gaily at the gate of Basle, where I was met by the old Swiss drum-major who, in the previous month of August, had inflicted on me "a liddle quarandine of a quarder of an hour;" but the cholera was over and I put up at the Three Kings, on the banks of the Rhine; it was ten o'clock on the morning of the 17th of May. The landlord procured me a travelling footman called Schwartz, a native of Basle, to act as my interpreter in Bohemia. He spoke German just as my good Joseph, the Milanese tinman, spoke Greek, in Messenia, when enquiring for the ruins of Sparta. On the same day, the 17th of May, at six o'clock in the evening, I moved out of port. As I stepped into the calash, I was amazed to see the Altkirch gendarme among the crowd; I did not know if he had not been sent after me: he had simply escorted the mail from France. I gave him some money to drink to the health of his old captain. A school-boy came up to me and threw a paper to me with the inscription, "To the Virgil of the Nineteenth Century;" it contained this passage, altered from the _Æneid_: Macte animo, generose puer[516]. And the postillion whipped up the horses and I drove off quite proud of my high renown at Basle, quite astonished at being Virgil, quite charmed to be called a child: "_generose puer._" [Sidenote: The Rhine.]