About nine o’clock on the following morning, being Sunday, the 31st of October, one of our company exclaimed, “_Voilà Bordeaux!_” The sound revived me exceedingly, for I was become irritable and impatient, from the length and fatigue of the journey. At twelve o’clock the coach halted, and my fellow-passengers immediately jumped out, leaving me to shift for myself. Of course I concluded that we had arrived at the coach-office, and began to call loudly for the conducteur to come and assist me in getting out. He immediately presented himself, uttered the now well-known “_toute a l’heure_,” and left me. Although I perfectly recollected the unlimited signification of this word in Paris, what could I do? Had I jumped out, I should not have known what step to have taken next, and the rain was falling in torrents. There appeared no remedy, but to sit patiently until it might please some one to come to my assistance. In a while I heard at least thirty people around the coach, talking a loud and unintelligible gibberish, quite unlike any language of the country which I had hitherto heard; soon afterwards I perceived the carriage undergoing an extraordinary, and irregular kind of motion; the people occasionally opened the door, and made me move from one side to the other, as if they were using me for shifting ballast; I inferred that they were taking off the wheels, with a view of placing the carriage under cover. After this I became sensible of a noise of water splashing, as if they were throwing it from out of hollows, where it had collected in consequence of the rain. It was in vain that I endeavoured to gain an explanation of my being thus left behind in the coach, the only satisfaction I could derive was “_tout a l’heure_,” and the conviction that nothing remained for me but to be patient. “But patience is more oft the exercise Of saints, the trial of their fortitude.” At length the motion began to increase, and to my great surprise, after an hour’s suspense, I heard the horses again attaching to the carriage; the passengers re-entered the coach, and we once more proceeded on our journey! It was afterwards explained to me, that these unaccountable proceedings arose, on our having arrived on the banks of the river Dordogne, which enters the Garonne, near Bordeaux, from the necessity, at this point, of transporting the carriage on a raft for some distance down the stream; that the passengers had crossed the river in a ferry-boat, to a coach waiting for them on the other side, leaving me to float down with the carriage on the raft, or sink to the bottom as fate might determine; in short, I found that, while I supposed myself sitting in the coach-office yard at Bordeaux, I had actually travelled four miles by water, without having entertained the least idea of such an adventure.