The morning comes--I don’t know a pleasanter feeling than that of waking with the sun shining on objects quite new, and (although you may have made the voyage a dozen times) quite strange. Mrs. X. and you occupy a very light bed, which has a tall canopy of red _percale_; the windows are smartly draped with cheap gaudy calicoes and muslins; there are little mean strips of carpet about the tiled floor of the room, and yet all seems as gay and as comfortable as may be--the sun shines brighter than you have seen it for a year, the sky is a thousand times bluer, and what a cheery clatter of shrill quick French voices comes up from the courtyard under the windows! Bells are jangling; a family, mayhap, is going to Paris _en poste_, and wondrous is the jabber of the courier, the postillion, the inn-waiters, and the lookers-on. The landlord calls out for ‘Quatre biftecks aux pommes, pour le trente-trois’--(O my countrymen! I love your tastes and your ways!)--the chambermaid is laughing, and says, ‘Finissez donc, Monsieur Pierre!’ (what can they be about?)--a fat Englishman has opened his window violently, and says, ‘Dee dong, garsong, vooly voo me donny lo sho, ou vooly voo pah?’ He has been ringing for half an hour--the last energetic appeal succeeds, and shortly he is enabled to descend to the coffee-room, where, with three hot rolls, grilled ham, cold fowl, and four boiled eggs, he makes what he calls his first _French_ breakfast. It is a strange, mongrel, merry place, this town of Boulogne; the little French fishermen’s children are beautiful, and the little French soldiers, four feet high, red-breeched, with huge _pompons_ on their caps, and brown faces, and clear sharp eyes, look, for all their littleness, far more military and more intelligent than the heavy louts one has seen swaggering about the garrison towns in England. Yonder go a crowd of bare-legged fishermen; there is the town idiot, mocking a woman who is screaming ‘Fleuve du Tage,’ at an inn-window, to a harp, and there are the little gamins mocking _him_. Lo! these seven young ladies, with red hair and green veils, they are from neighbouring Albion, and going to bathe. Here come three Englishmen, _habitués_ evidently of the place,--dandy specimens of our countrymen: one wears a marine dress, another has a shooting dress, a third has a blouse and a pair of guiltless spurs--all have as much hair on the face as nature or art can supply, and all wear their hats very much on one side. Believe me, there is on the face of this world no scamp like an English one, no blackguard like one of these half-gentlemen, so mean, so low, so vulgar,--so ludicrously ignorant and conceited, so desperately heartless and depraved.