It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I found there a pleasant woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three daughters, all of great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in the German of Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above her head was a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant manner, until she had restored the discipline of her family. This great placard was framed in the three colours which once brought a little hope to the oppressed, and at the head of it in broad black letters were the three words, 'Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law'. Underneath these was the emblematic figure of a cock, which I took to be the Gallic bird, and underneath him again was printed in enormous italics-- Quand ce coq chantera Ici credit l'on fera. Which means-- When you hear him crowing Then's the time for owing. Till that day--Pay. While I was still wondering at this epitome of the French people, and was attempting to combine the French military tradition with the French temper in the affairs of economics; while I was also delighting in the memory of the solid coin that I carried in a little leathern bag in my pocket, the hard-working, God-fearing, and honest woman that governs the little house and the three great daughters, within a yard of the frontier, and on the top of this huge hill, had brought back all her troops into line and had the time to attend to me. This she did with the utmost politeness, though cold by race, and through her politeness ran a sense of what Teutons called Duty, which would once have repelled me; but I have wandered over a great part of the world, and I know it now to be a distorted kind of virtue. She was of a very different sort from that good tribe of the Moselle valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic-- (she had a little tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see what religion is, that makes people of utterly different races understand each other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by the worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so much love his own nation as hate his neighbours, and even the twilight of chivalry is mixed up with a detestable patronage of the poor. But as I was saying--) she also was a Catholic, and I knew myself to be with friends. She was moreover not exactly of- what shall I say? the words Celtic and Latin mean nothing-- not of those who delight in a delicate manner; and her good heart prompted her to say, very loudly-- 'What do you want?' 'I want a bed,' I said, and I pulled out a silver coin. 'I must lie down at once.' Then I added, 'Can you make omelettes?' Now it is a curious thing, and one I will not dwell on-- LECTOR. You do nothing but dwell.